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CHRIST 

AND THE 

DRAMAS OF DOUBT 

STUDIES IN THE PROBLEM 
OF EVIL 



BY 
RALPH TYLER FLEWELLING 




NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM 



*> 

^ 






■ 



Copyright, 1913, by 
RALPH TYLER FLEWELLING 



©CI.A361074 



TO J. C. F. 

WHOSE UNWAVERING LOVE AND 
APPRECIATION HAVE BEEN A 
GUIDING LIGHT ACROSS THE YEARS 



CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTORY 
CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

The Causes of Doubt 3 

Basis of the problem — Doubt comes with 
culture — Arises from the existence of moral 
and physical disorder — From the missed 
aim of happiness — From mental and moral 
readjustment — Lack of adequate life 
motive — From the failure of spiritual 
ideals. 



CHAPTER II 

The Epochs of Doubt 18 

The drama as an expression of the problem 
in its most living form in all lands and ages 
■ — The age of iEschylus — The age of Job — 
The age of Hamlet — Of Shakespeare — Of 
Goethe — Of Ibsen. 



vi CONTENTS 

THE FIRST STEP 

Prometheus Bound — The Struggle with an 
Impossible Theology 

CHAPTER III 

page 

The Revolt Against an Inhuman God 35 

Story and problem of Prometheus Bound — 
A God without moral responsibility in an 
increasingly moral world. 

CHAPTER IV 

Groping After the Way 45 

The law of retribution an assured fact — The 
law of sacrifice making demands on life — 
The necessity of reconciliation between 
man and God — (a) On the part of Pro- 
metheus — (b) On the part of Zeus — The 
Grecian demand for the incarnation. 

THE SECOND STEP 

Job — The Struggle with the Mystery of Pain 

CHAPTER V 

"When the Storm of Death Roars Sweeping 
By" 59 

Job the drama of doubt deepest in its hold 
on life — The false estimate of happiness — 
The story and problem. 



CONTENTS vii 

CHAPTER VI 

PAGE 

Defending Tradition Against Light 69 

The inadequate theology of Job's day — 
Adequate only in theory — The defense of 
tradition against the facts — Where lies 
faith? 

CHAPTER VII 

A Religion or Barter 82 

The religion Satan sneered at — Righteousness 
for its own sake — A new note in Christian 
teaching. 

CHAPTER VIII 

The Plains of Peace 93 



The things that time and sense cannot restore 
— That which is better than happiness — 
The partial nature of human experience — 
Understanding not necessary to peace — 
Doubt not to be solved intellectually — To 
have God is enough. 

THE THIRD STEP 

Hamlet — The Struggle with the Problem of 
an Outraged Moral Order 

CHAPTER IX 

The Heart of Tragedy — Practical Doubt . . 107 
Hamlet's a practical doubt — The story and 
problem — The unethical character of in- 



viii CONTENTS 

tellectual belief — The insidious nature of 
practical doubt — The modern lesson in 
Hamlet's problem — The Divine Nemesis. 

CHAPTER X 

PAGE 

The Task Beyond the Powers 119 

The stupendous character of Hamlet's task — 
The pessimism of modern life like that of 
Hamlet — A moral paralysis in the face of 
tasks — The sense of God in the moral order. 

CHAPTER XI 

The Unlit Lamp and the Ungirt Loin. . . . 131 

The harvest of irresolution — The common 
ruin of guilty and innocent — Indifference 
to moral questions inexcusable — To lose 
the soul — What does it mean? — Hamlet's 
salvation in the existence of a moral order. 

THE FOURTH STEP 

Faust — The Struggle with the Problem of 
Redemption 

CHAPTER XII 

A Problem of Unpardonable Sin 143 

The difficulty of analysis of Goethe's work — 
The story and problem — The intellectual 
aspect — The spiritual element. 



CONTENTS ix 

CHAPTER XIII 

PAGE 

Redemption by Confession 157 

The irremediable nature of sin — The tradi- 
tional moral supports of Margaret — The in- 
effectiveness of remorse alone — The neces- 
sity for retribution — The Great'Renuncia- 
tion. 



CHAPTER XIV 

Redemption by Striving 170 

Difference between Faust's and Margaret's 
problem — The sin against light — Living in 
the good and beautiful, selfishly — The 
wilderness of strife — "The hunter is home 
from the hill." 



CHAPTER XV 

Did Goethe Solve the Problem? 184 

The attempt to avoid a Dualistic world — 
Too short to span the distance between 
hell and heaven — The "Streben" philosophy 
in modern life — The unappreciated secret 
of the Cross. 



x CONTENTS 

THE FIFTH STEP 

Brand — The Struggle Arising from the 
Failure of Spiritual Ideals 

CHAPTER XVI 

PAGE 

"All or Nothing" 201 

The iron conscience — The story — Brand's 
character analyzed — The successive tests 
of Brand's motto of life — "All or nothing" 
in present-day life. 

CHAPTER XVII 

"Where Love Is, God Is" 219 

Brand's failure from an overemphasized in- 
dividualism — From a false view of the 
meaning of sacrifice — Mercy too is a virtue. 

CONCLUSION 

CHAPTER XVIII 

The Problem in Modern Thought 235 

The modern pessimists — Readjustment of 
ideas — Misconception about happiness — 
The presence of moral and physical disorder 
— The lack of motive — The Breakdown 
of religious ideals — Re'sume' of the problem. 



CONTENTS xi 

CHAPTER XIX 

PAGE 

Jesus of Nazareth and the Personal Solu- 
tion 259 

The individual must be considered in relations 

— The identification of God with cosmic 

^ life — The identification of God with human 

achievement — The lifting of the individual 

life to the universal plane. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 273 



INTRODUCTORY 



CHAPTER I 

THE CAUSES OF DOUBT 

A clergyman is said recently to have 
announced that he would preach from the 
subject, "Why do the corners of the mouth 
turn down?" We do not know how the 
good brother dealt with his question, nor 
what was the outcome, but in his homely 
phrase was a world of meaning. The phrase 
might well have been the theme of this 
chapter. In one form or another, now 
facetious and now in the darker phrasing 
of tragedy, it has been the fateful question 
of life which men have been working at 
from the beginning even until now. And 
though many misconceptions have been 
cleared away, in its abstract aspect very 
little positive ground has been gained. 
The problem still faces us, the despair of 
poet and philosopher alike. The reason for 
this failure to put at rest these questions 



4 CHRIST AND THE 

will eventually be found to lie, not in the 
imperfection of the natural world, but in 
the unfinished, unperfected quality of the 
human spirit, which cannot be satisfied 
with a world which is less than perfect and 
as yet is far from the moral goal which is 
home. The eternal words of Augustine 
come with a new pertinence and conviction 
to the present age, and we know them 
true: "Our hearts are restless till they rest 
in Thee." 

Basis of the Problem 

How deep and how ancient is this problem 
may be seen by reflection upon the earliest 
history of religion. The great religious 
myths are all concerned with the struggle 
of gigantic forces for mastery: light against 
darkness, good against evil. The rising and 
setting of the sun, the morning and evening 
stars, the waxing and waning moon, the 
approach and recedence of the seasons 
become but the poetic symbol and imagery, 
the outward representation of that which 
was, in the last analysis, the deeper strug- 
gle of man's own unresting heart. It is 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 5 

not to be wondered at that all in him which 
called out for the eternal, the good, the 
pure, the abiding, seemed linked with the 
higher powers and processes of nature in a 
world in which he was but an atom. 

Doubt Comes w t ith Culture 

In this early stage man was not a doubter. 
Despair may have been a constant factor 
in his life; fear surely was, but to his naive 
imagination there was no place for doubt. 
Doubt is not the product of those active 
days in the life of a race, a nation, or an 
individual, when struggle is being made for 
conquest of natural forces. Those nations 
that have had the hardest struggle for ex- 
istence have ever been the most religious. 
Doubt comes with ease, with reflection, with 
fullness — physical and intellectual. It there- 
fore never appears in decided form in early 
stages of civilization, when men are pio- 
neering the world, but is, rather, the prod- 
uct of more cultured days. The great 
literature of doubt appears not in the 
beginning but in the decadence of cul- 
ture. 



6 CHRIST AND THE 

Doubt Arises from the Existence of 
Moral and Physical Disorder 

Perhaps the first great shock to the re- 
flective mind arises from the existence of 
moral and physical disorder in a universe 
created and controlled by a good God. 
However much certain persons may arise 
to affirm that evil, pain, sorrow, and mis- 
fortune are but aberrations of the mind, 
such a solution can never satisfy the souls 
of any but the well fed, well dressed and 
comfortable. It is a useless thing for men 
whose lives are daily tragedies, and who 
are not satisfied with a perfectly selfish and, 
therefore, immoral solution. However one 
may go on in his isolated self-sufficiency, 
the fact remains that great floods devastate 
and destroy the earth and the people in 
it. The pathos of Jean Ingelow's "faire 
Elizabeth," with her children drowned by 
the high tide on the coast of Lincolnshire 
and cast by the ebb before her own door, 
is a tragedy that has been often repeated. 
The ebbing tide of disaster too often lays 
our dearest and most precious stark and 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 7 

lifeless at our feet. Great fires destroy the 
innocent and the guilty. Earthquakes have 
no way of passing by the homes of the 
just, but move with a startling impartiality. 
Epidemics of disease carry off the brightest 
and the best. Ofttimes the vicious, the 
useless, and the evil live through long years, 
corrupting the stream of life, while the 
good and the brave do not live out half 
their days. 

Nor do we seem to be much better off 
when we approach the moral realm. Here 
we see not only the innocent suffering with 
the guilty, but the innocent suffering for 
the guilty. The greatest sufferer is not 
the man who commits sin, but some inno- 
cent and blameless life that is tied to him 
by bonds of relationship and affection. 
Very often there is an obtuseness in the 
criminal by which he seems to be incapable 
of deep suffering. The more revolting his 
crime the less his capacity for sensitive feel- 
ing. The burden of a man's sin falls less 
upon himself than it does upon those near- 
est to him. 

When the seven sons of Saul for Saul's 



8 CHRIST AND THE 

crime were hanged by the men of Gibeah, 
the greatest suffering was neither Saul's 
nor his sons'. The great sufferer was the 
tearless Rizpah, watching through days of 
heat and starless nights, from the beginning 
of harvest until the coming winter. The 
same truth is borne home in the verses of 
Kipling's "Mother o' Mine." 1 

If I were hanged on the highest hill, 
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine! 

I know whose love would follow me still, 
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine! 

If I were drowned in the deepest sea, 
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine! 

I know whose tears would come down to me, 
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine! 

If I were damned of body and soul, 
I know whose prayers would make me whole, 
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine J 

He who declares there is no pain nor evil 
takes but a shallow and inadequate view 
of the deepest moving facts of life. Nor is 
this all. Many lives seem to go astray in 
the scheme of things. Sometimes the finest 
spirits are forced to pessimism by a sense 
of personal wrong and social isolation, as 

1 Kipling, Dedication to The Light that Failed. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 9 

in the case of Shelley and Heinrich Heine. 
The shallow and the superficial are often 
exalted to the place of prominence and 
power, and set to rule over men of far greater 
capability, whose capacities go undeveloped 
and undiscovered, and who sink out of life 
with no opportunity to speak their message 
to the world — "of whom the world is not 
worthy," and of whose possibilities the 
world stands in sore need. 

No age has ever been so conscious of 
the immeasurable wastes of society as the 
present. Little children toil away strength, 
childhood, imagination, the possibility for 
the spiritual, the opportunity for mental 
development, in sweatshop, home, and 
factory. A greedy and materialistic age 
robs them of the most priceless gifts of life 
before they have attained the age of under- 
standing, and turns them into middle life 
with diseased bodies and minds, unculti- 
vated spiritual lives, in some cases but 
little better than the beasts of the field, in 
some cases worse. The existence of moral 
and physical disorder becomes thus one 
of the most pressing problems of the age. 



10 CHRIST AND THE 

Doubt Arises from the Missed Aim of 
Happiness 

The darkness cast by the cloud of moral 
and physical disorder might perhaps be 
forgotten if only a considerable portion of 
the race seeking happiness could find the 
way thither. But this way seems forever 
closed. Happiness does not dwell in the 
halls of the great. No class finds life so 
futile and unsatisfying as that which sits 
continually in the lap of ease. The strug- 
gle for amusement among the rich becomes 
more tragic than in the so-called less fortu- 
nate is the struggle for bread. That pes- 
simism cannot be exceeded which, as Presi- 
dent Jordan 1 says, is "a reaction from un- 
earned pleasures and spurious joys." 

All gratification that becomes an end in 
itself seems to yield the same result. Un- 
bridled indulgence makes further enjoy- 
ment impossible. Pleasure, to remain pleas- 
urable, must be earned. Even in the 
religious realm this is true. Stirred emo- 
tions and states of rapture which are never 



David Starr Jordan, The Philosophy of Despair, p. 27, 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 11 

connected with genuine gains in character 
and in service of one's fellows, end in a 
disillusionment and spiritual poverty in 
which one may hear the cry, "All is vanity." 
This despair arises out of a false concep- 
tion of happiness, a false estimate of its 
relation to the remainder of life, and the 
fact that nothing which is not itself eternal 
can satisfy the human soul. 

Doubt Arises from Mental and Moral 
Readjustment 

The necessity for moral, mental, and 
political readjustment is also a cause for 
despair in many minds. There come times 
when the very face of the earth is so changed 
by upheaval that men have to make com- 
plete readjustment and build them new 
homes before life can go on. 

The scientist in his laboratory makes 
a discovery which renders inconsistent a 
whole system of theology that has remained 
unquestioned for years. A political up- 
heaval casts upon a monarchical theism the 
necessity to look upon God across a rising 
tide of individualism. The tribal god of 



12 CHRIST AND THE 

Israel's national life gives way with polit- 
ical dependence to a God whom Jesus 
teaches men to call Father. The vindic- 
tive and irresponsible gods of older Greece 
fall before a growing sense of individual 
moral responsibility. A political theory goes 
down in the crash of war, and for a time 
there is much confusion and noise. Many 
charges and counter-charges are made, and 
only with time do many readjust their 
thinking to the new order of things. Such 
an age came to Israel with the exile and the 
readjustment following that most signifi- 
cant event in her national history. Greece 
saw such a day when the little confederation 
first realized its strength in the turning back 
of the Persian tide under Xerxes which 
made possible the age of Pericles. England 
witnessed such a period of transition after 
the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the 
call to empire in a newly discovered world. 
Europe witnessed like scenes of tumult in 
the rise of a new individualism, the revolt 
of the human spirit generally present but 
spectacularly realized in the French Revo- 
lution. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 13 

When old systems of thought become 
inadequate the extremists declare that the 
old is without virtue and should be thrown 
over altogether. The other side, realizing 
the truth of the old, and not yet seeing the 
way clear to readjustment, appeals to tra- 
dition. Such an age is always one of doubt 
and darkness. 

Doubt Arises from Lack of Adequate 
Life Motive 

One very much underestimated cause of 
despair has yet to be named. More pes- 
simism springs from lack of adequate motive 
in life than from all other causes. The 
causes already named are speculative, but 
this is practical. The world can move on 
so long as doubt concerns itself exclusively 
with the speculative issues, but when it 
enters into practical life it- becomes vicious 
and harmful. Speculative doubt is the 
indulgence of a few reflective minds, or 
of men with morbid physical and mental 
conditions. Practical doubt is the pos- 
session of vast multitudes. The man who, 
devoid of motive, hid his talent in the earth 



14 CHRIST AND THE 

was not only struck with despair at his own 
helplessness and weakness, but he was struck 
also with moral blindness. He overlooked 
his responsibility for what had been only 
trusted to his keeping, and was cast out 
both for his sloth and for his wickedness. 
The reason men are struck with world- 
weariness is because they have wandered 
through the world of sense and experience 
with no motive beyond that of self-grati- 
fication. Their excursion into the world 
of learning has been without moral aim. 
It is such lives, with motive inadequate for 
an immortal being, that turn back dis- 
appointed on the toilsome way. Neither 
the will to feel nor the will to know is 
in itself enough. In a moral being they 
demand a moral purpose. Both experience 
and knowledge are the means to action. 
They awaken the strongest impulses to 
action, and if these impulses are resisted, 
there is moral and spiritual deadness and 
despair. Experience that is not wrought 
out in life, that does not lead to a better 
character, making one more honest, more 
sympathetic, more loving, more serviceable, 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 15 

is like Israelitish manna whose worth did 
not last beyond a single day. 

The men who despair for the well-being 
of the world are never the men who are 
throwing themselves into the saving of the 
world. They are men whose hearts have 
been convicted of responsibility. They are 
men who have sensed the need of self- 
giving, but have not been willing to enter 
upon the saving of the world in the only 
way it can be saved — by personal contact 
and unselfish action. 

When one hears the voice of despair one 
may be certain of this alternative: the 
presence of morbid pathological conditions 
in the man's body or the weakening of the 
man's moral fiber. The skepticism that is 
most dangerous to the church does not 
much concern itself with the theoretical 
aspect of belief. The unbelief that threat- 
ens the life of the church is the unbelief that 
sings songs, repeats creeds, testifies on Sun- 
day, and during the week gives itself solely 
to the accumulation and enjoyment of the 
things of the world. Such a religion is no 
more exempt from the pit of despair than 



/ 



16 CHRIST AND THE 

is an intellectual world that learns and 
learns and never comes to a knowledge of 
the truth, because behind it is no adequate 
motive. 

Man must discover the personal im- 
perative of duty between his life and the 
world of relations around him. He cannot 
take it out in intellectual dream or religious 
vision. To be able to abide, it must touch 
the ground. There must be a sense of per- 
sonal relationship to God which calls him 
to practical duty. The personal imperative 
of duty must be a divine command on his 
life. Knowledge or so-called religious ex- 
periences not wrought into life and action 
deaden and disarm both mind and soul, 
and the end is despair. "The experience 
of all the ages brings only despair if it can- 
not be wrought into life." 1 

Doubt Arises from the Failure of 
Spiritual Ideals 

This brings us close to the problem raised 
by the failure of spiritual ideals. Some- 
times men in the very pursuit of religion 

1 David Starr Jordan, The Philosophy of Despair, p. 14. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 17 

seem to overshoot the mark and end in 
absolute denial. This is sure to be true 
of any man who follows a religious ideal 
that is not open to revision by the growing 
experience of life. Spiritual ideals must 
have the power of expansion and change 
under the light of reason and experience. 
We undertake a dangerous course when we 
decide upon a religious action which de- 
mands that we hoodwink the mind or do 
injustice to our finer sense. Religion, in- 
stead of being out of harmony with the finer 
sentiments of life, is in strict keeping with 
them. No truly religious ideal can remain 
ever the same for any living soul. Day 
by day it must become something better 
and more perfect. Dissatisfaction and 
spiritual unrest should be taken not as the 
tokens of failure but as the evidences of 
a life struggling for expression. The true 
man, having done his best, must feel that 
he has failed. The mountain heights of 
Jesus's character remain to rebuke the low 
levels of his own attainment. 



18 CHRIST AND THE 



CHAPTER II 

THE EPOCHS OF DOUBT 

The Drama as an Expression of the 

Problem in Its Most Living Form 

in All Lands and Ages 

So soon as one begins to study the great 
literary monuments that deal with the prob- 
lem of evil he will be struck by the similar- 
ity of conditions under which they have 
been produced. Upon the sands of time 
successive waves have left their highest 
mark, but there are many evidences of the 
same primal impulse from the same un- 
resting sea. Man's literary effort has 
reached its high tide in the drama or trag- 
edy, and tragedy's one question concerns 
itself with the solution of the problem of 
evil. We need but to name them over to 
realize this fact. The book of Job, iEschy- 
lus's masterpiece, the Prometheus, Hamlet, 
and Faust would by common consent be 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 19 

granted the highest rank in the literary 
world. The most significant drama of 
recent years might perhaps with less una- 
nimity be accorded as being Ibsen's Brand. 
The eras that brought them forth present 
most striking similarities. Each of these 
dramas brought the ever-recurring problem 
to the surface at a time when a new in- 
dividualism was forcing itself upon civili- 
zation by reason of great religious, intel- 
lectual, or political changes. 

Because of this living element the drama 
is the truest expression of real problems. 
It presents problems as they exist in the 
common thought of a nation or people. 
Such problems are not dramatized, or, at 
least, do not make successful appeal to 
their time unless they have been keenly felt 
in contemporary living. Their message 
is thus more direct and clear than that of 
other contemporary literature. 

Awakened by new scientific and intel- 
lectual attainment, startled by the dis- 
covery of new worlds, or the renaissance of 
old civilizations, men follow the stars of 
great hopes. But the moment of fulfill- 



20 CHRIST AND THE 

ment is sure to be a moment of disillusion- 
ment. The national triumph looked for- 
ward to, instead of settling national prob- 
lems, only opens the way out of the old 
contentments into a far more perilous road 
of larger tasks and struggles. Man casts 
his spear into the ground at every hill- 
crest of attainment and, before looking 
around, says, "Here we rest" — but the next 
moment discloses to his startled perception 
higher peaks and vaster pilgrimages. He 
cannot rest, and his task seems too great for 
him. 

In the religious realm the tragedy be- 
comes far more acute, for here men are ever 
demanding certainty. The possibility of 
theological change threatens to the common 
mind the direst calamity. We are strictly 
told that we walk by faith and not by sight, 
but who can be content with so dangerous 
a program? We immediately endeavor to 
bolster faith with philosophical theory that 
shall make faith more or less unnecessary. 
That theory we falsely dignify with the 
name of faith. Growth in intellectual per- 
ception, the rising tide of human experience, 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 21 

has swept out the foundation of the under- 
lying philosophy, and man in despair has 
set forth again upon this shoreless sea, while 

. . . evermore 
Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar, 
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam. 

The accomplishment of political refor- 
mation, the firm seating of new intellectual 
systems, the triumph of a cause, the dis- 
illusionment which comes with the unsatis- 
fying Utopia, brings a moment of great 
popular despair. Outside is hindrance 
which, unforeseen, keeps man back from 
entering his promised land, with the ruth- 
lessness of an arbitrary fate. At such a time 
the thoughts of men turn inward. There 
comes within the consciousness of higher 
spiritual qualities which can conquer, yea, 
rise to the highest when the dearest ma- 
terial dream 1 lies in hopeless ruin. 

The Age of JEschylus 

Such an age produced iEsehylus. The 
Grecian confederacy had by a supreme 

1 Courtney, The Idea of Tragedy. 



22 CHRIST AND THE 

effort turned back the barbarian hordes 
of Persia. The threatened supremacy of 
Persian culture was at an end. iEschylus 
himself had been a soldier in that war 
for Grecian independence and civilization. 
Greece reveled in her triumph. At first 
blush there was promise of a new birth of 
freedom. She felt the call of a great 
national destiny. Her triumph was the 
triumph of Greek institutions. There was 
to be a new girding of the loins for tasks. 
The inspiration was thrilling the hearts of 
all classes of society. There was a breaking 
away from old thralldoms and superstitions. 
The lower classes were demanding a place 
and a voice in government. Along with 
this came a new birth of the Grecian re- 
ligious consciousness. The triumph of 
Grecian institutions meant also the triumph 
of the Grecian gods. Yet the old religious 
conceptions were like old winesacks that 
were incapable of containing the new wine 
of religious feeling. With a new touch upon 
Egyptian civilization there had come a new 
sense of the sinfulness of sin. Egyptian 
Orphism had rendered the older Grecian 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 23 

conceptions inadequate by introducing a 
new sense of sin and blood-guiltiness. 1 

Men were awed by the seriousness of the 
readjustments that faced them. There 
were the ancient doctrines of divine malig- 
nity and moral perverseness which had been 
made impossible by the rising conscious- 
ness of the supremacy of moral values. A 
Zeus who could sit supreme and in laughing 
contempt 

Looking over wasted lands, 

Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring 

deeps and fiery sands, 
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking 

ships, and praying hands — 

to whom all was as a tale of little meaning — 
fell far short of satisfying the necessities 
of the human spirit. To meet the problem 
raised by such a crisis iEschylus wrote his 
great tragedies. With all his faith he was 
not without trepidation at the threatening 
elements in the new day that had come to 
Greece. He feared the growing power of 
the masses. He feared the collapse of old 

1 Campbell, Tragic Drama, p. 147. 



24 CHRIST AND THE 

institutions ; most of all he feared that in the 
shifting tides of change might be lost the 
consciousness of God. His mind was alert 
to what seemed to him the impieties of the 
time. Is not all this reflected in the suffer- 
ings of an impious Prometheus, at the same 
moment in which are prophesied the final 
reconciliation and deliverance, and the 
justification of the ways of God which we 
must believe formed the climax of the third 
and last member of the Promethean drama ? 

The Age of Job 

In the case of the drama of Job it is 
not so easy to dogmatize, for there is among 
scholars the widest range of opinion as to 
the age that produced it. The foremost 
objection to a late age for the book is the 
almost total lack of any reflection in it of 
Jewish institutions as we know them after 
the exile. It was this fact that led Renan 
to declare its author not a Jew but an 
Idumean. There seems to be much plausi- 
bility in this theory until we reflect upon 
the possibility of literary culture and philo- 
sophic grasp among the wandering Arab 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 25 

tribes of Edom, the singular solitariness 
of this great book, and the needed explana- 
tion of its arrival in the Jewish canon. 

If, on the other hand, the priestly litera- 
ture did not arise until some time after the 
return from exile, it would be possible for 
the book to have been written after the 
exile, and in that period following the return 
when the high hopes raised by the resto- 
ration had been blasted by partial failure. 
It is best to leave this part of the problem 
to the biblical experts with more adequate 
resources and to go meekly where the 
greatest own themselves puzzled by con- 
flicting considerations. Suffice it to say 
that from the exile on to the very coming 
of Jesus there were recurring political situ- 
ations in Judah that closely fit the common 
condition for the drama of doubt. The 
completion of the temple, the rise of a king, 
the fall of an ancient enemy, each was 
sufficient to awaken the consciousness of 
defeated and misunderstood destiny. 

After the exile the Hebrew race was ever 
conscious of such a religious destiny. The 
return from the exile and the reconstruction 



26 CHRIST AND THE 

of the temple were the tokens of God's favor 
and the evidences of the national mission. 
During this period that portion of Asia 
was convulsed by sweeping tides of politi- 
cal change. Kingdoms waxed and waned; 
dynasties that had promised to be eternal 
passed in a night. It was a period of great 
migrations that decided the destinies of 
the Western world. 

Profoundly conscious of the superiority 
of his religious system, the Jew lived pos- 
sessed by a great hope that Israel was soon 
to take her true place in the leadership of 
the nations. The more the years grew away 
from the exile the more intense became her 
problem. She had held to a doctrine of 
a God who overruled the stream of history, 1 
and who rewarded righteousness with ma- 
terial prosperity and evil with calamity 
and adversity. 

Hitherto Israel's religious problem had 
been national, the problem of a group. 
Ezekiel had filled the darkness of exile with 
lightning flashes proclaiming inevitable per- 
sonal responsibility. He declared their sins 

1 Wenley, Aspects of Pessimism, pp. 16, 17. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 27 

to be not the sins of a group but of indi- 
viduals, who had brought destruction upon 
the nation, and who would suffer their 
individual punishment. But the temporal 
reward of righteousness and the punish- 
ment of the evildoers did not agree with 
the facts as seen in human life, and to this 
problem the author of Job addressed him- 
self. 

The Age of Shakespeare 

The age that produced Hamlet was like- 
wise remarkable. Europe was now reaping 
the fruits of the revival of learning. Prot- 
estantism had, over considerable sections 
of Europe, come into undisputed power. 
The destruction of the Spanish Armada 
had been for England the birth of a new 
national consciousness. It had brought 
the idea of national destiny. Spain's em- 
pire beyond the seas was already sending 
home its golden argosies. Spain had been 
conquered on the seas by the grace of God 
and the intrepidity of English sailors. 
Bacon, in the world of investigation, was 
laying the foundation for the new day of 



28 CHRIST AND THE 

scientific knowledge. The heavy hand of 
change had been laid upon medisevalism 
with its constant tendency to substitute 
theory for fact. Among the masses the 
superstition concerning magic, satanic in- 
fluences, the black arts, lingered still. On 
the one side were the people clinging to the 
mechanical mediaeval conception of the 
problem of evil; on the other hand were the 
scientific men tinctured with a spirit of 
skepticism in the ardor of the new learning. 
Hamlet represents the problem raised by 
this contest. Was Hamlet Shakespeare's 
English answer to the soliloquizing pessim- 
ism of Montaigne? 1 Shakespeare's demand 
was for action. He had a conviction of 
divine Nemesis as clear as iEschylus him- 
self. He saw the truth that evil draws 
destruction in its own train. He saw also 
that a living faith was necessary to a true 
meeting of the problem of existence. The 
sinews of righteousness would be cut by 
doubt. It was better to stumble blindly 
toward the goal than by inaction to un- 
nerve the true forces of character. 

1 Jacob Feis, Shakespeare and Montaigne. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 29 

The Age of Goethe 

The world that witnessed the production 
of Goethe's Faust was also a world of fer- 
ment, political, intellectual, and religious. 
Over western Europe and America existed 
the spirit of individualism which was most 
spectacularly set before the world in the 
French Revolution. An ancient feudal- 
ists aristocracy was dissolved with great 
heat, and its world passed away before the 
new world had found itself. In the philo- 
sophical world Kant had already come to 
show the inconsistencies and failures of 
the inductive philosophy. With the rising 
demand for individual freedom there was 
also a demand for greater freedom of 
thought and the emancipation of the spirit. 
Everywhere life was bowed down by con- 
ventions. 1 The age was singularly poor 
in the spiritual and moral values. Men 
had lost the consciousness of personal touch 
with God. In England the Wesley an re- 
vival was only beginning. There was not 
present, as in iEschylus's Greece or Shake- 



1 Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets, p. 151. 



THE FIRST STEP 

PROMETHEUS BOUND— THE STRUGGLE 
WITH AN IMPOSSIBLE THEOLOGY 



CHAPTER III 

THE REVOLT AGAINST AN INHUMAN GOD 
Story and Problem 

a. THE STORY 

The Greek drama known as Prometheus 
Bound was the outgrowth of the troubled 
spirit of a great nation. The little land 
had cast back the tides of invasion, her 
white-sailed ships were in every port, her 
high-walled cities were filled with the 
treasures of art, her people were blessed 
with a growing enlightenment, her political 
star was rising to the zenith, but her heart 
was filled with unrest. There was an 
earnest desire to follow and to serve the 
gods that every loyal Greek felt had been 
the means of saving them from the Persian 
tyranny. But their very victory had thrust 
them upon darker and deeper questioning. 
The pick and flower of the nation had all 
too generally fallen upon the field. With 

35 



36 CHRIST AND THE 

Lowell, iEschylus could mourn for those 
who 

. . . come not with the rest, 

Who went forth brave and bright as any here! 

I strive to mix some gladness with my strain, 

But the sad strings complain, 

And will not please the ear; 

I sweep them for a paean, but they wane 
Again and yet again 

Into a dirge, and die away in pain. 

It was a fact that the living had been 
saved to a great destiny, but the true, the 
noble, and the great had bought that destiny 
with their lives. 

Pain, misery, misfortune, and death had 
ever been interpreted in the Greek religion 
as the result of the anger of the gods. Now 
they were faced by the paradox — the anger 
of the national gods had fallen upon the 
saviors of the nation. No one was fitted 
more clearly to see or more deeply to be 
moved by this problem than iEschylus. 
He had, through his bringing up at the seat 
of the Eleusinian mysteries, by his contact 
with the newly introduced Orphism of 
Egypt, been impressed with the fact that 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 37 

sin brought its own sure and swift ruin. 
The sins of the fathers were visited with 
terrific vengeance upon the children. The 
blood of the murdered cried from the 
ground. Upon him was now thrust the 
further problem of justifying a god who 
would not only see to it that terrible sin 
was terribly punished, but who did not 
spare the stroke from the brave and the 
good. Into what crisis of thought the peo- 
ple were cast may best be read in the 
literature and history of the time. iEschy- 
lus was the last to write in the full belief 
in the ancient Homeric and Hesiodic gods. 
Euripides, who followed him, was an in- 
novator and a heretic. Upon JEschylus 
was cast the supreme task. 

To serve his purpose he had at hand the 
popular tradition regarding Prometheus. 
The name means to iEschylus "Fore- 
thought," though it may for an earlier day 
have borne the simpler meaning "Fire- 
b ringer." Prometheus was the fountain 
of man's intellectual gifts, the one who 
had enabled him to ameliorate his hard 
lot and to conquer the earth. From him 



38 CHRIST AND THE 

had come not only the knowledge and use 
of fire, but all the arts of civilization. He 
was man's defense from the unrelenting 
hates of Zeus. His intervention and defeat 
of the sterner will of Zeus called down the 
divine anger. Therefore, Titan though he 
is, and in other days the helper of Zeus to 
supreme rule, he is chained to a great rock, 
exposed to the elements and suffers daily 
to have his liver fed upon by the eagle. 
We have arrived at the very climax of the 
problem — the good, the beneficent, suffer- 
ing for his beneficence. Had ^Eschylus a 
memory of a darker hour when Cynegiras, 
his elder brother, fell dying in his arms at 
Marathon? But the spirit of defiance which 
speaks through the lips of Prometheus is 
also the protest of iEschylus against every 
such heathen conception of God. 

Let him hurl me anon into Tartarus — on — 

To the blackest degree, 
With Necessity's vortices strangling me down ! 
But he cannot join death to a fate meant for me. 

The introduction of Io with her sufferings 
at the hands of the inhuman Zeus is only 
to complete the picture of the impossible 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 39 

God. He faces his problem in the darkest 
degree. Prometheus seems to perish in 
the crash of worlds. 

Earth is rocking in space 
And the thunders crash up with roar upon roar — 
And the eddying lightnings flash in my face 
And the whirlwinds are whirling the dust round and 

round, 
And the blasts of the winds universal, leap free 
And blow each upon each, with a passion of sound. 

And iEther goes mingling in storm with the sea! 
Such a course on my head in a manifest dread, 
From the hand of your Zeus has been hurtled along ! 
O my mother's fair glory! O iEther enringing, 
All eyes with the sweet common light of thy bringing, 

Dost thou see how I suffer this wrong? 1 

b. THE PROBLEM A GOD WITHOUT MORAL 

RESPONSIBILITY IN AN INCREASINGLY 
MORAL WORLD 

It will be seen that the real problem of the 
Prometheus is the justification of a god 
who is the author of pain, suffering, and 
sorrow, and the problem is not solved in 
that portion of the drama which remains 
to us. The Prometheus Bound is the 



1 Mrs. Browning's translation. 



40 CHRIST AND THE 

second number of a trilogy of dramas which 
brings the problem to intensest form and 
statement. We must believe that the ques- 
tion was met in iEschylus's own way in 
the third member of the trilogy, the 
Prometheus Unbound, of which we have 
but the merest fragment. 

The old religious teachers of Greece had 
represented that Zeus was envious of the 
success, comforts, and happiness of men; 
that he loved to strike the fairest and the 
dearest. iEschylus strove to show that 
he was angry not against success but against 
sin. 1 

"In the half -century before his time, 
what is vaguely known as the Orphic move- 
ment, due partly to fresh contact with 
Egypt and the East, had gained much 
prevalence amongst enlightened Greeks. 
. . . The horror of blood -guiltiness, the 
sense of human sinfulness and divine wrath, 
and of the need of purification and atone- 
ment, were at the same time greatly deep- 
ened. Religious hopes and fears, though 
still largely turning on ceremonial con- 

1 Plumptre, iEschylus, ix. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 41 

ditions, became more individual and per- 
sonal. 1 

"Not the destruction of an existing order, 
as in Shelley, not in the omnipotence of 
human intellect, as in Goethe's lyric, but 
the ultimate harmonizing of apparent op- 
posites in the divine nature, with the cor- 
responding peace on earth and good will 
among mankind is the ground idea of the 
trilogy as a whole." 2 

Thus far has iEschylus come in the 
statement of the problem. A god of ret- 
ribution is an assured fact, witnessed by 
the common tragedies of life. Suffering is 
a necessity, cast upon those who would most 
help the race, and who insure the rule of 
the gods over men. This story life has 
told him in scenes of heartbreak and aspi- 
ration. But in a god of retribution who 
punishes without moral responsibility he 
cannot believe. If that is the highest con- 
ception, man might better "curse God and 
die," amidst the echoes of divine wrath. 
Yet in rebellion against God there is no 
peace. To fight and die for the good of 

1 Campbell, Tragic Drama, p. 144. 2 Ibid., p. 147. 



42 CHRIST AND THE 

the race implies a daily recurring and mean- 
ingless agony in which one's breast is torn 
anew with heartbreak. 

Hast thou not seen this brief and powerless life, 
Fleeting as dreams, with which man's purblind race 
Is fast in fetters bound? 1 

In these words he voices the depths of his 
despair in the face of his problem. 

Mankind has made long marches away 
from the darkness of thoughts which 
filled the mind of iEschylus. We have 
learned new and different things about God 
through his revelation in the face of Christ. 
And yet so little changed is human nature 
that, in spite of the gospel, the mind is 
prone to return to the primitive conception. 
It is easy to interpret our misfortunes as 
the wrath of God, and to compare our little 
pleasures with the divine smile. We too 
often think of God as inimical to human 
happiness. With many still the greatest 
criterion of sin is enjoyment. That in 
which the natural man takes pleasure seems 



Lines 558-560, Plumptre's translation. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 43 

of itself sin. The catastrophes of nature — 
fire, earthquakes and cyclones — continue 
to be interpreted here and there as the 
wrath of God. The death of little children 
is now and then represented as a divine 
judgment. The wearing of amulets has 
not completely departed from this Christian 
age. There lingers a suspicion of the divine 
malevolence, a feeling that in pure joy we 
are most unsafe. Human happiness is too 
often represented to the young as framed 
in misery and suffering. This sort of super- 
stition about God could never hold for a 
moment if w r e were to keep strictly to the 
true conception of the God in Christ. 
Because we have felt it necessary to con- 
firm all the ancient Hebraic ideas of God, 
we have hidden the full-orbed features of 
the face of Christ. 

Never does this question come so vividly 
before us as when we stand over the grave 
of a life that all too soon has been called 
from work through pain, inhumanity, or 
suffering. We wonder at the divine good- 
ness. Or we see a life that has wasted its 
opportunities, and, so far as human under- 



44 CHRIST AND THE 

standing can go, there is only a fearful 
looking for of judgment. 

Of this we need to be assured. We have 
looked upon God in the face of Jesus Christ. 
What Christ would have been to such a 
soul God will be to him. What Christ 
would be to us in our grief, were he present 
as when in Galilee, that will God be to us. 
There is no need to approach God with 
indirectness. Christ was the human image 
of the Father. Let us not think his love 
is less than ours. Let us not dream his 
sense of justice is less than ours. Our love 
and justice are but a tiny cup where his are 
a great sea. The judgment of this Grecian 
seer of the long ago was correct. An in- 
human God cannot command the worship 
of men. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 45 



CHAPTER IV 

GROPING AFTER THE WAY 

The Law of Retribution an Assured 
Fact 

iEscHYLUS, in all his tragedies, has held 
true to the theory of retribution for sin. 
It is maintained by some that there was 
in him no thought of a remedial end of 
suffering, but only of a retributory purpose. 
At any rate, we may be sure that just here 
was a point that most puzzled the mind of 
the great dramatist. He saw the limita- 
tions of his theory of retribution. One 
crime demanding another for vengeance 
was a process that would never end until 
there were no more men left of a house, or 
a race, to be murdered. In the end ven- 
geance would defeat its own aim, and fall 
upon the guiltless. The problem thus raised 
he strove to settle in his Eumenides, 
where even the hand of vengeance is stayed 



46 CHRIST AND THE 

from the final stroke after the sinner has 
been driven, suffering, across the world. 

Yet ^Eschylus held in the main to the 
theory of the friends of Job. No sin could 
go unpunished, and from this he drew the 
doctrine that all suffering implied guilt. 
We must believe this was his thought re- 
garding Prometheus. Prometheus had been 
the great benefactor of mankind. His 
power had been used to seat Zeus on the 
throne and to secure him reverence and 
worship among men. His mind was able 
to read as well the limits of Zeus' sway. 
He knew the weakness of the Supreme God 
as men then knew and read him. But 
with access of knowledge came access of 
impiety. His denunciation and rebellion 
against God was sure to be met by punish- 
ment. If we take Prometheus as the im- 
personation of human forethought and 
skill, with its constant contribution to the 
rising tide of civilization, we shall see what 
iEschylus meant. Human wisdom was 
prone to flaunt itself in the face of the gods, 
to rob them of their just dues, to question 
their right] and power, and every such sin 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 47 

of impiety, though it rise from men who 
have done most for the race and the cause 
of religion, must be met with its proper 
punishment and retribution. No man, 
though he be a Titan, could escape it. This 
was in strict accordance with the world as 
he saw it. The hand of death knocked at 
every door. Calamity is no respecter of 
persons. He had seen the loveliest and the 
best giving their lives a forfeit for others. 
Death fell not only upon the unjust, but 
also upon those who were careful in main- 
taining scrupulously the forms of religion. 
There must be with them, as thought the 
friends of Job, some secret sin, some vaunt- 
ing of the heart, which could not escape the 
all-seeing wrath. 

It is a curious thing how deeply this feel- 
ing is written into the human heart, how 
wide a spell it has cast over our religious 
conceptions, and how it lingers in the 
minds of men. This is because it is the 
easiest explanation, and the mind de- 
mands explanation. Suffering may come 
as the awful retribution and reward for 
sin. No man has lived long who has not 



48 CHRIST AND THE 

had opportunity to see for himself that 
"the wages of sin is death." Very many 
sins we know carry within themselves fear- 
ful consequences to the sinner in this life. 
With a just God how could it be otherwise? 
How easy it is when the misfortune happens 
not to us but to our neighbor to lay it to 
his sinfulness and error! If these are un- 
seen, it is only a part of the frailty of human 
judgment to conclude there are hidden sins 
for which he is being punished. We ask 
with unblushing casuistry the old, old ques- 
tion of his disciples, "Did this man sin or 
his parents?" They thought they were 
presenting a dilemma to the Master, that 
he must answer one way or the other. 
How surprised they must have been to have 
him answer, "Neither did this man sin nor 
his parents!" 

The Law of Sacrifice Making Demands 
on Life 

I am quite aware of the importance 
of keeping in mind that we must not 
allow our Christian conceptions to guide 
our judgment on the implications of this 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 49 

greatest of Greek tragedies. Yet it may 
not be amiss to note that either con- 
sciously or unconsciously in his thought of 
divine Nemesis, or retribution, iEschylus 
did hit upon the eternal law of sacrifice. 
We know he must have seen it, though as 
yet it was not very clear. He must have 
been a keen discerner of the depths of 
human experience. He had seen how the 
blessings and prosperity of the present had 
been won by the fearful sufferings of the 
past. As I have mentioned above, his 
brother had died beside him in the battle 
of Marathon, that glory of Grecian history. 
If tradition be true, 1 his other brother, 
Ameinias, was in charge of the galley that, 
single-handed, began the attack upon the 
Persian fleet at Salamis when others were 
retreating in fear. At any rate there must 
have come close home to his heart this 
problem of how the liberty and prosperity 
of the many were purchased by the ill- 
deserved suffering of the few. Prometheus 
pictures his own life problem as it is done 
by none other of his known works. He 

1 Ridgeway, Origin of Tragedy. 



50 CHRIST AND THE 

had abundant opportunity to know the 
deeper truth of what Annas meant so 
falsely: "It is expedient that one should 
die for the whole nation, and that the nation 
perish not." The Greeks who came to 
see Jesus should have recognized the con- 
gruity of his words with their supreme 
drama. "If I be lifted up," was his most 
direct way of telling them that he would 
most benefit the world by laying down his 
life. Who may say that the Master did 
not purposely voice thus his appeal to the 
deeper Grecian religious consciousness, a 
consciousness present not only in iEschylus 
but in the Grecian religious mysteries? 
Who can say that the men who heard that 
day failed to understand? We must be 
aware that the preparation for the gospel 
was not carried on in Palestine alone, nor 
was it alone in the singular providence of 
the universal Roman rule, nor was a uni- 
versal language the only contribution of 
the Greek mind. The preparation for 
Christ was deeper and more universal than 
were even these. It is a matter not with- 
out significance that the great preacher of 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 51 

salvation by the cross was born and reared 
under Grecian influences and with a Grecian 
education, and that for the most part he 
preached to the Grecian world. It was 
no accident that his clear-seeing mind per- 
ceived the vital interest of Christianity 
where the more Jewish apostles were slow 
in appreciation. Paul conquered the Greek 
world with the message of the cross. 

The Necessity of Reconciliation 
a. on the part of prometheus 

However striking the similarities and 
coincidences may have seemed so far, these 
will be deepened by a further consideration 
of our problem. The one section of Pro- 
metheus which is in our possession closes 
with Prometheus engulfed in the debris of 
crashing worlds. We are brought by dra- 
matic climax to the intensest appreciation 
of our problem, and there is no answer to 
the question thus shouted into the dark. 

We are not left, however, absolutely with- 
out guidance. In the story of Io, iEschy- 
lus has made Prometheus prophesy that 
Io's descendant should eventually release 



m CHRIST AND THE 

him, and that God and man shall at last 
be reconciled. We do know the title of 
the last of the three dramas on Prometheus, 
and that it was Prometheus Unbound. 
We also know from his other work that 
yEschylus was a believer in the moral qual- 
ities of Zeus, and that he could not have 
closed the tragedies with the impression 
left by the only one we have. So we have, 
after all, sufficient data to draw safe con- 
clusions. 

iEschylus was speaking to a public which 
would have very quickly resented any 
mark of impiety. The drama was given 
at a religious festival, had for its object the 
teaching of religion, and had to enter into 
competition with others for the right of 
presentation. 

His mind would have been quick to 
detect the necessity for reconciliation be- 
tween God and man. All the elements 
for such reconciliation had already been 
introduced. All the forces, so little under- 
stood, so mysterious, were moving toward 
"the far-off divine event." The abused 
and hapless Io, representing not "wisdom" 



DRAMAS OP DOUBT 53 

or "foresight," but just plain, suffering, 
unrecognizing humanity, was suffering for 
an end. By and by he who was born of 
her should be the means of Prometheus 's 
release. Heracles was to be a divine in- 
carnation that should end the sufferings 
and the impiety of Prometheus. What 
wonder that early Christians caught up 
quickly the analogy, or that the Grecians 
so often identified Christ with their Her- 
cules ! 

b. THE NECESSITY OF RECONCILIATION ON 
THE PART OF ZEUS 

In such a case as this iEschylus felt that 
it was not sufficient that reconciliation 
should be on one side. The mystery con- 
tained in the inexplicable cruelties of Zeus 
must be made clear. They must have some 
eventual moral reason and they must be 
for good to man. Perhaps, as one suggests, 1 
Zeus, himself made perfect by suffering, 
will relent of his hard reign, and at last, 
far off, the mystery of evil will be solved. 
When the infant Hercules lays low the 

1 Campbell, Guide to Tragedy, p. 199. 



54 CHRIST AND THE 

vulture that has daily torn the vitals of 
Prometheus, the agony of the ever-recurring 
problem will be no more. "Foresight/' 
the best attainment of human wisdom, was 
sufficient only to intensify the problem. 
In reconciliation and obedience to the will 
of God alone lay the way to peace. God 
seemed inhuman, there was no avoidance 
of the issue. But, somewhere, when man 
had the sufficient data of experience, and 
had himself sufficiently progressed in moral 
attainment, all would be made clear. The 
heart thus fortressed throws itself back upon 
the Everlasting Arms, as ^Eschylus makes 
his chorus to sing in the Agamemnon: 

"On him I cast my troublous care, 
My only refuge from despair: 
Weighing all else in him alone I find 
Relief from this vain burden of the mind. 
. . . Zeus, who prepared for men 
The path of wisdom, binding fast 
Learning to suffering." 

What higher revelation than this could 
there be for the Grecian mind, till Christ 
should come? ^Eschylus had held by the 
highest course that was possible to human 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 55 

wisdom. He was the prophet of what 
Christ fully revealed, for who could know, 
either then or now, that God is not in- 
human, except as he reads the truth in 
the face of Christ? I think I see love and 
goodness in its highest human expression 
in the face that once bent above my cradle. 
But even in that face, now glorified by 
memory and the years, there was not per- 
fect patience, nor perfect holiness. It is 
not enough. I must find that human face 
which is also the face of God before I can 
know of a very truth that God is love. 
And this I have in Christ. Any picture 
of God that contrasts with the love of 
Christ I instantly reject as spurious. No 
man can confuse me on that point. What 
was blind to iEschylus to me is certain — 
my God is Eternal Love, because I have 
seen his image in the face of Christ. 



THE SECOND STEP 

JOB— THE STRUGGLE WITH THE MYS- 
TERY OF PAIN 



CHAPTER V 

"WHEN THE STORM OF DEATH ROARS 
SWEEPING BY" 

Job, the Drama of Doubt, Deepest in 
Its Hold on Life 

Of all the dramas that deal with doubt 
it should occasion no surprise that the great- 
est should spring from the Hebrew race. 
The place of the book of Job in the Old 
Testament canon is an eternal argument 
for the right of a reverent skepticism. Its 
place in the Bible is like the place of 
Thomas, the questioner, in the discipleship 
of Jesus. We do not often realize the debt 
we owe to this rare book for its poetic, 
singing lines. No poet of the ages is quoted 
so commonly in daily life. The words of 
Job have entered into the natural and 
common speech of man wherever the Bible 
is known. What holy grief does not at- 
tempt to climb upward to the submission 

59 



GO CHRIST AND THE 

of those lines, "The Lord gave, and the 
Lord hath taken away"? Whose trials or 
confusions have not been lightened by the 
thought of that place, where "the wicked 
cease from troubling; and the weary be 
at rest"? What despair fails to remind 
itself that "Man is born unto trouble, as 
the sparks fly upward"? or that one's days 
are "swifter than a weaver's shuttle"? 
Who has not braced himself in sorrow with 
Job's assurance, 

" He knoweth the way that I take; 
When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold"? 

And so there are a hundred other lines 
which are so interwoven in English speech 
that we repeat them without knowing their 
origin. What a testimony is this to the 
vital value of the book! 

The False Estimate of Happiness 

While the problem of the book of Job is 
very similar to that of Prometheus Bound, 
there are certain very marked points of 
difference. We can only guess what the 
genius and spiritual insight of iEschylus 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 61 

may have added to the solution of the 
problem in those parts of the drama which 
have been lost. 

Prometheus is a hero. He withstands 
a cruel and unjust god. But he is himself 
a god, and therefore is immortal. He 
knows his love and passion for men will 
survive even if Zeus is dethroned and 
cast to the scrap-heaps of time. His 
heroism is a heroism against any possible 
suffering. 

Job is a greater hero. He stands up to 
ask his question of life when to ask it is, 
in the common thought, blasphemy that 
may be immediately resented by a God who 
can not only deepen his suffering, but can 
take his life and perpetuate his suffering 
in the life to come. His friends picture 
God as sending material prosperity to the 
righteous and adversity to the sinful. If 
a man suffers, it is because God is angry 
at his sins, and will get even. Job knows 
that this theory does not square with life. 
He too often sees the robber and the 
plunderer blessed by prosperity. If God 
has no deeper sense of righteousness than 



m CHRIST AND THE 

to call "getting on in the world" — robbing 
by legal process — righteous, he will defy 
him. 

His friends confuse worldly happiness 
with the smile of God. Their object of 
worship is to be fortunate here and here- 
after. They will be honest because it is the 
best policy. They will subsidize their re- 
ligion and make it pay both temporal and 
eternal dividends. Job strikes through 
the mists of this false philosophy and ir- 
religious religion and presses toward the 
heights. Happiness and sorrow are the 
incidents of life. They come to the just 
and the unjust alike. There are greater 
things than happiness. To be true to his 
own soul is better than to be happy. Here 
he will rest. Here at last he attains the 
plains of peace. 

The Story and Problem 

The opening scene of the drama is laid in 
heaven. Among the sons of God comes the 
Adversary, from walking to and fro in the 
earth. He is the cynic who delights in 
discovering and showing up the weaknesses 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 63 

of human nature. He has many kin in 
modern society, some of whom mistake their 
cynicism for superior morality and religion. 
He replies to God's satisfaction in Job 
with a sneer that Job doesn't serve God for 
nothing. This sneer of Satan gives the 
motif of the drama — religion as a matter 
of barter. It is the implication that no 
men are religious save for what they hope 
to get out of it. Satan is given his will 
for the testing of Job. 

Upon a day a servant comes running 
to tell him that while his men were plowing 
with the beasts in the field, suddenly all 
have been carried away by mountain ban- 
dits. While this one is yet speaking, 
another comes to say that lightning has 
fallen and consumed both the sheep and the 
shepherds. His story is not yet told when 
another hastens to say that the Chaldeans 
have fallen upon the camels and have taken 
them away. While this messenger tells 
the story of disaster, lo! another, coming, 
tells him that his sons and daughters lie 
dead in the ruins of their home. So far 
Job's answer to calamity is this, "The Lord 



64 CHRIST AND THE 

gave, and the Lord hath taken away; 
blessed be the name of the Lord." 

But Satan is permitted a yet deeper test. 
To leave no room for doubt as to his being 
singled out for sorrow, Job is smitten with 
leprosy, a disease that by the Oriental was 
considered the supreme evidence of divine 
displeasure. Outside every Eastern city 
stood a great mound, where through cen- 
turies the offal of the city had been borne. 
Here in the dust, ashes, and filth is taken 
the suffering Job, abhorred of men, cast off 
by his wife, whose sardonic advice is to 
"say good-by to God and die." Menials, 
whose fathers he would not have trusted 
with the dogs that guarded his flocks, pass 
by mocking. His tale is on every lip. 
It reaches at last far-away friends who have 
known him in his days of greatness, and are 
perchance drawn to visit him as much by 
curiosity as by love. Far off, they discern 
the solitary figure of their friend upon the 
ash heap, but so changed and loathsome by 
disease and neglect as to be unrecognizable. 
In accordance with Oriental courtesy, they 
wait through seven days and nights silent 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 65 

till Job shall speak. Finally he begins to 
curse the day of his birth and to lay the 
depths of his sorrow before them. Their 
answer was in strict keeping with the pre- 
vailing theology. These calamities are the 
testimony of God's judgment upon his past 
sins. He is not the man they supposed him 
to be. Job defies a God that would punish 
without a trial and conviction, but they 
are inexorable in their belief of his sin. At 
last the real secret of their advocacy of this 
inhuman God breaks upon him. They are 
defending an unjust God because it is safest 
to keep in with the Almighty. They dare 
not question the traditional God for fear 
they will lose their souls. They claim there 
must be about him some sin which he has 
concealed from everybody. The fact of 
his suffering lets it out. Job can only reply 
that his heart does not condemn him. But 
his friends say that before the Infinite 
Holiness lie sins of which the mortal is un- 
conscious. To this view they are driven 
by their adherence to the traditional theol- 
ogy. They dare not face the deepest ques- 
tions honestly for fear of offending God. 



G6 CHRIST AND THE 

They will defend the God of tradition even 
when their convictions are against them. 
This is Job's moment of heartbreak. He 
can no longer trust his friends. The soli- 
tary figure upon the ash heap is solitary 
indeed. The last bond of mortal com- 
panionship is snapped. He stands alone in 
the universe with God. 

God answers him out of the whirlwind. 
As Elihu is repeating his pious platitudes 
in a last effort to save the argument of the 
three silenced friends, and to condemn Job, 
a storm arises. At first, when it is far 
away, he uses it to draw moral lessons to 
Job's discomfiture. Soon he sees it to be 
an approaching whirlwind. Terrified, he 
cries out, "Has some one told God that I 
was speaking?" The conviction of his 
heart now told him that his pious words 
about God had been false. The friends 
crouch in terror of the lightning and the 
fear of being swallowed up by the storm. 
They are not themselves so holy but it 
might strike them. Their theory of re- 
ligion is exposed in all its emptiness by a 
mere storm. It is the experience of selfish, 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 67 

brutish Caliban told in its own inimitable 
way. 

What, what? A curtain o'er the world at once! 
Crickets stop hissing; not a bird — or, yes, 
There scuds His raven that has told Him all ! 
It was fool's play, this prattling! Ha! The wind 
Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the 

move, 
And fast invading fires begin! White blaze — 
A tree's head snaps — and there, there, there, there, 

there 
His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him! 
Lo lieth flat and loveth Setebos! 

Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month 
One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape. 1 

No thunderstorm has power to add to the 
depth of Job's troubles. Death would be 
welcome to him. He alone of all that 
company is undisturbed. His friends' ter- 
ror refutes their respect for their theology. 
But God has a word to say to Job. Out 
of the sublimity of the storm he "hears 
a deeper voice across the storm." He 
learns how small is his place in the vastness 
of the universe, to which his individual 

1 Browning, Caliban on Setebos. 



68 CHRIST AND THE 

suffering is but as an ugly dream of the 
night. God's ways are past finding out. 
Trust on! He may never be happy, but 
out of his pain he has come into God's Holy 
Place. He finds that there is a peace 
deeper than that which comes by material 
happiness. His sense of righteousness and 
devotion to the will of God is his peace 
and his reward. 

The close of the book is only incidental. 
The return of material joys is not needed, 
for Job has learned the secret of happiness. 
It is added, rather, to keep the literary bal- 
ance of the book and to furnish a satisfaction 
for those who could not read its deeper 
philosophy of life. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 69 



CHAPTER VI 

DEFENDING TRADITION AGAINST LIGHT 

The Inadequate Theology of Job's Day 

The prevailing theology of Job's day is 
represented as being that God will reward 
righteousness with temporal prosperity. 
This was the teaching of Malachi, whose 
prophecies had probably before this become 
the vogue, and obedience to which had 
not brought the anticipated rewards. He 
urged the return of the people to tithing, 
in order to insure the fertility of the field, 
and perchance to avoid also the threatened 
Edomite invasion. That, surely, was a bold 
reaction which in the book of Job dared 
affirm that material prosperity alone was 
insufficient to indicate holiness of life. 
How deeply this question and its resulting 
theology must have been driven into the 
national and individual life we may guess 
from the pages of Israel's literature, il- 



70 CHRIST AND THE 

luminated by the pages of her history. 
The days of religious faultlessness, after 
the return from exile, and the rebuilding of 
the temple, had not been met by prosperity. 
She had never been more true to her faith, 
more punctilious to the jot and tittle of 
the law, than in the days of the Persian 
ascendancy. Her theory of God led her 
to believe that though Israel had suffered 
for her sins in the past, now she had learned 
her lesson and was to come into the summit 
of her power. In the meantime the land 
was harried by Edomite and Nabatean. 
The more religious were the ones upon 
whom the stroke fell heaviest. The old 
thought that suffering was the wrath of 
God on sin did not suffice for the solution 
of her problem. Neither was there help 
in the later theory that suffering is God's 
warning to escape deeper judgment. We 
may be sure these words were written near 
some crisis in the national life when the 
justification of God's ways had been 
brought to a standstill, and men were left 
horror-struck and lonely in the apparent 
absence of a divine providence. The 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 71 

moment had come when a large proportion 
of the people could see that very often the 
righteous man was made to suffer. Yea, 
his very righteousness intensified the suffer- 
ing, for he was troubled continually by the 
flings of a troubled conscience, while his 
conscienceless and ungodly neighbor reaped 
his stolen gains undisturbed, and lived 
anew, unrebuked, in the generations that 
came after him. The question here pre- 
sented was the existence of suffering when 
one had lived up to the fullest light of 
revelation granted him, and felt within his 
heart that he had done the best he knew. 
Even then the facts of life proved that in 
specific cases there was suffering, that suf- 
fering was long continued, and that its 
purpose was not clear. Thus a theology 
that had been sufficient for the earlier and 
cruder days of Israel's experience was now 
found to be broken down in the face of the 
stress of life, and the great question re- 
mained of how one should conduct his life 
in the circumstances. How one could face 
the facts and keep the faith was Job's 
problem. 



72 CHRIST AND THE 

Adequate Only in Theory 

The book admits that there is one class 
to whom the old theory of temporal rewards 
and punishments is sufficient. The theory 
is perfectly adequate for the three friends 
who are in comfortable circumstances, and 
also for the youth, Elihu, with his limited 
experience. It is easy to read the moral 
and spiritual lessons of disaster to our 
friends so long as we ourselves are com- 
fortable. It gives a glow of superior wis- 
dom, a feeling of superior management and 
of superior traits of character, that we are 
prospered, while the brother at our side 
goes down in ruin. It is entirely human 
to think, if he had directed his life according 
to our wisdom, he would not now be suffer- 
ing. So we fill up his cup of bitterness 
with good advice, gratuitously and hope- 
fully given. The truth is we do not under- 
stand the problem. Its deeper thrust is 
not brought home to us until the weapon of 
pain stabs us wide awake. Our house of 
complacency goes down about us in hope- 
less wreck. Out of the ruins we try to 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 73 

patch some theory that will enable us to go 
on and will keep life from utter despair and 
failure. Commonplaces that sounded to 
us like the profoundest philosophies to 
assuage others' woes we now find utterly 
empty and inadequate. Many theories 
of evil are adequate for our day of power 
and prosperity. Whence comes he who 
can answer the problem of our day of sor- 
row? The minister comes and utters 
his well-meaning words, the solemn-faced 
friends speak conventionalities, but sorrow 
is an indivisible thing — it is all our own. 
It stalks like a specter through all our days. 
It sits an unwelcome guest at our fireside 
and makes the richest viands of our tables 
tasteless. Theories may be adequate for 
those who do not suffer. They are inade- 
quate for him who suffers. 

The Defense of Tradition Against the 
Facts 

The gap that yawned between Job and 
his three friends was not then entirely 
intellectual nor theological. Their theory 
and Job's had been identical in the old 



74 CHRIST AND THE 

happy days. But the swift succession of 
untoward events had put a great gulf 
between them. They could not come to- 
gether because they were not discussing 
the question on the same plane. The 
three friends and Elihu were arguing from 
the standpoint of a traditional belief with- 
out those deeper facts of experience which 
alone could have made them conscious of 
the failure of their theory. This is a situ- 
ation that frequently recurs in theological 
discussion. There is always barrenness and 
futility when the intellectual settlement of 
the problems of life is separated from actual 
experience. This accounts for the fre- 
quency with which the purposes of God are 
hid from the wise and prudent and revealed 
unto babes. So much must be said for the 
immediate aspects of the situation. There 
was this further complication: the friends 
were defending a well-established theory. 
This theory they made the mistake of 
identifying with the eternal order of truth. 
It was to them a divine and eternal reve- 
lation, unchangeable, undevelopable, un- 
answerable. Out of such a position two 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 75 

ideas immediately arose into prominence. 
If these theories were eternally revealed 
truths, any man who, like Job, questioned 
them was, to use their phrase, condemned 
the moment he opened his mouth. In the 
second place, any facts of nature or expe- 
rience which contradicted their eternally 
inspired theory must be denied or taken by 
the shoulder and led quietly away where 
they could be conveniently cast into the 
outer darkness. If one is eternally sure 
that he has the unadulterated, unmodifiable 
truth, what need is there for light? what 
place is there for further light? 

All these facts took intense and dramatic 
form in the dealing of the friends with Job. 
Job held throughout his trial to two funda- 
mentals which were like an anchor of his 
soul and which moored him to God until 
the storm was past. He refused to belie 
the good testimony of his own conscience, 
and he refused also to believe that God was 
an unjust being whose ways with men 
needed to be justified by a lie or by a denial 
of the darkest facts of history or of life. 

To his friends Job had been the human 



76 CHRIST AND THE 

ideal of righteous conduct. Even now in 
his deep distress they appeal to that refuge 
of a certain type of theology — imputed sin. 
There must be a great deal of sin in him 
which they could not see, of which Job 
himself was not conscious, but which was 
plain to the Eternal. There could be no 
question of his wickedness, for, if so, why 
did he suffer? The fact of Job's righteous- 
ness is brought into square contradiction 
with the traditional theory. To question 
the traditional theory is impious. The 
only thing left is to commit the sin against 
common sense and deny the facts. Job 
must be a wicked man. 

Now, upholding eternally sure theories 
against disagreeable facts has some very 
patent weaknesses. For instance, it is an 
evidence of unfaith and irreligion. Shut- 
ting one's eyes to the facts, even for the 
sake of God and the divine order of truth, 
is not so much a matter of faith as it seems 
to be. For if this is God's world, then his 
manifestation of himself in the world of 
the present cannot be denied. If, then, our 
theory is found in contradiction to his 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 77 

revelation of himself in the world of life 
and of thought to-day, there is room for a 
suspicion that what we thought eternal was 
but a partial truth, needing revision. It 
can never be necessary to deny the facts of 
life and experience in order to defend the 
truth. On the other hand, any supposed 
truth that needs to be thus defended is 
only a passing theory. Of one thing we 
may be sure : we can lie down to our resting 
beds in peace knowing full well that no 
discovery can be made overnight that will 
sweep away the truth. Yea, though our 
resting bed be that of the long, long night, 
we may know that Truth's candle will not 
be blown out by any blast that can blow in 
God's world. Some "will-o'-the-wisps" are 
sure to go out, but the light of Truth never ! 
If a man is certain of truth, then he is never 
called to defend it by questionable means. 
Any fear on his part of its overthrow shows 
that he is but half convinced himself, or 
is so joined to his idols that he wishes his 
theory to remain even though it prove to 
be a lie. Such is an essentially irreligious 
attitude of mind. 



78 CHRIST AND THE 

When Job made the discovery that his 
friends were ready to defend their con- 
ception of God by denying the facts, his 
indignation knew no bounds. Hope lay 
quenched within his heart. "Will ye lie 
for God?" he cries. His scorn for such a 
theory and such a God is without limit. 
In such a light Job's doubt looks more like 
faith in God than all the settled belief of 
his friends. Job's world of experience was 
too large to be accounted for by his friends' 
theology. Their standpoint of upholding 
God's justice by denying the facts of ex- 
perience was insufficient for him, as it must 
be for every great sufferer. To doubt our 
insufficient and inadequate faith may be 
an act of religion and the doorway into 
larger faith. 

Where Lies Faith? 

Who, then, is the man of faith? Surely 
not he who dares not trust his truth to the 
bufferings of intellectual criticism and the 
storms of human experience. Surely not 
he who can commit mental dishonesty to 
uphold the truth. To lie for God is the 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 79 

most pernicious atheism. It denies the 
power of truth to stand for itself and 
eventually to command the minds of men. 
In this book of doubt Job is not the doubter. 
He is the only man of real faith. The 
faith of the friends must inevitably fall 
under such shocks of life as had come to 
Job. Job said, "I will believe in a righteous 
God against all appearances." He would 
cling to the witness of his heart though 
God were to slay him. His friends saw the 
facts of life arrayed directly against the 
conception of God in which they had been 
brought up. Yet they insisted on belief 
against the facts. Here the absence of 
doubt was not the evidence of religion. It 
was the evidence of inexperience, of shallow 
thinking and of mental dishonesty. Who, 
then, is the man of faith? It is the man 
who, crushed by the hand of sorrow, has 
looked into brassy and unanswering skies 
all forsaken, yet in the darkness and numb- 
ness of his heart has held fast to the God 
whom he could no longer see, nor feel, nor 
understand. Not he upon whose mental 
calm has never blown the disturbing wind 



80 CHRIST AND THE 

of deeper questionings that will not be put 
by, but he who has seen the faith of early 
days lie shattered, and who, despite the 
storm, holds true to the fundamental loyal- 
ties. His house is founded on a rock. 

"Defender of the Faith" may not, then, 
be so high a title as the world has supposed. 
Truth needs only to be spoken. Its de- 
fense is never needed. The faith that men 
defend is all too likely to be the passing 
theory or "ism" of a day. Surely the 
amount of noise that attends its procla- 
mation is not to be taken as an evidence of 
its eternity. "He shall not strive nor cry 
... in the streets." His truth, nevertheless, 
inarches on to the conquest of the world. 
It can never be gainsaid, however plausible 
the theories, however hoary the institutions, 
that would bar its progress. The founda- 
tion of God standeth sure on these two 
principles : God's recognition of his children 
in this world of time and the unanswer- 
able argument of lives that have departed 
from iniquity. If only we could be 
grounded on these eternal facts, then we 
had no need to be disturbed by changing 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 81 

mental conceptions of this or any age. 
No possible intellectual or scientific dis- 
covery could have given us fear, and all 
our religious energy might have been re- 
leased for the bringing of Christ's kingdom 
in the world of to-day and in the hearts of 
our friends and neighbors. 



82 CHRIST AND THE 



CHAPTER VII 
A RELIGION OF BARTER 

The Religion Satan Sneered At 

The crisis of the drama of Job comes 
with the discovery on the part of Job that 
his friends are ready to deny the facts of 
his own integrity in order to save their 
theology. The reason for this soon appears 
to him. They do not intend to mince words 
with one who is so evidently heretical. The 
defense of the Almighty becomes a passion. 
It is the only safe method to take with an 
Almighty whose ways with man are so 
incomprehensible and who punishes for the 
secret thought of the heart. 

One must not imagine that they were 
without all feelings of sympathy for their 
old-time friend. The contrast of former 
prosperity with present abjectness was all 
too pronounced. They must not, however, 
let feelings of sympathy for his suffering 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 83 

hold them back from speaking the disagree- 
able truth. Job certainly must be very 
wicked. His real wickedness must be in 
proportion to his suffering. If, now, he 
will only get after this secret sin which they 
have been unable to discover and which he 
disavows, all may yet be well. 

"Who ever perished, being innocent?" r 
says Eliphaz. Bildad follows up with the 
declaration that doubtless Job's children 
had received the just reward of their deeds, 
and Job was spared because for him there 
was some reserve of hope. Seek the Al- 
mighty with pure hands and he will send 
prosperity again. 

Job replies out of the depth of a bitter 
experience that he sees the earth given into 
the hand of the wicked, while God permits 
the faces of judges to be covered. So far 
as the external appearance goes, 

If I be wicked, woe unto me; 

And if I be righteous, yet shall I not lift up my head. 

What is the use of appealing to such a 
God, a God of temporal rewards and punish- 
ments, who rewards and punishes according 



84 CHRIST AND THE 

to these known facts? What use to appeal 
to such a tribunal? 

Zophar says, "Your sin is one of doc- 
trine"— 

If thou set thy heart aright, . . . 

Surely then shalt thou lift up thy face without spot. 

But Job, reasoning on their basis, replies, 
"I cannot, however, get past the facts" — 
"The tents of robbers prosper." They are 
only lying about his integrity to save their 
God of barter from the embarrassing ques- 
tion, "What about the prosperity of the 
wicked?" 

Eliphaz is shocked by Job's impiety, but 
declares the prosperity of the wicked is 
temporary and external, and accompanied 
by the greatest mental terrors. 

Ah ! it is not, then, a question of external 
rewards! But have they not been arguing 
his wickedness from external punishments? 
Bildad becomes hard, upbraiding his pre- 
sumption of innocence from his own in- 
ternal consciousness. The old argument 
was for a moment in grave danger of cutting 
off its own head. Job feels the injustice 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 85 

of their words and cries out, "I know that 
my Vindicator liveth." 

Zophar interrupts, to bring him back to 
the argument: 1 

"The joy of the godless is for a moment." 
"Wherefore then," says Job, "do the wicked live, 

Become old, yea, wax mighty in power? 

Their seed is established with them in their sight 

Their houses are safe from fear." 

Instead of being mentally disturbed they 
gather comfort from their lack of fear of 
Jehovah, "having consciences seared as 
with an hot iron." "But," says Eliphaz, 
"their prosperity is uncertain." 

"How often is it blown away like chaff?" 
is Job's appeal to fact. 

"God layeth up his iniquity for his 
children," says Bildad. 

Job replies, "Let God punish the respon- 
sible party, not the innocent." 

And so the debate goes on in the attempt 
to prove that it is altogether well to be 
religious, if one is to enjoy the life that now 

1 Following Professor Moulton's suggestion in the Modern 
Reader's Bible. 



86 CHRIST AND THE 

is. Religion after this order is just the kind 
at which Satan had sneered. It was just 
the kind that Satan had declared Job's 
was. If only nothing further were to be 
gained in temporal reward, and only days 
of unalleviable pain stretched out before 
him, Job would be like all the rest of these 
barter saints. Satan's only mistake was 
in thinking the only religion practiced by 
men was a religion of barter. He was not 
wrong in his contempt for a religion that 
did right for a reward. A religion that 
loves righteousness chiefly because it de- 
plores purging fires, a religion that loves 
honesty because the gains that way are 
largest, a religion that loves truth not for 
its own sake but as the means of escaping 
torment, is a religion that breaks down at 
the moment it is most needed. It is sure 
to fail when the divine smile seems with- 
drawn. Instead of building character on 
eternal principles of right and wrong, it 
settles itself down to an external code of 
conduct, a hollow category of external 
exercises, which it hopes will bring eternal 
blessedness. There can be no true nor 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 87 

growing institution in which the religious 
appeal is based preeminently upon the self- 
ish interest, or where this interest long 
remains predominant. The disciples again 
and again sought to press this religion of 
barter upon Jesus. His invariable reply 
was that he could only promise them bitter 
cups to drink, and fierce baptisms where- 
with to be baptized. It was in proportion 
as they forgot rewards in the doing of a 
great and pressing task that their rewards 
should be. The man who is good for a 
consideration is like the child that is cour- 
teous for a piece of candy. There is for 
the moment the external appearance wished 
for, but there is an eternal insufficiency 
of character. The setting forth of the 
appeal on this lower plane of being good 
for a reward rather than for love of truth, 
righteousness, and God has not been with- 
out its disastrous results. In our midst 
is the religious bargain-hunter who strives 
continually to beat down the Almighty to 
the smallest possible gifts and sacrifices that 
may succeed in saving his soul. Grace has 
little chance where the rewards of time and 



88 CHRIST AND THE 

sense are so carefully adjusted with the 
Eternal. The words of Jesus fall with 
startling rebuke across the ages: "Where 
the treasure is there will the heart be 
also." 

Righteousness for Its Own Sake 

It seems strange to us to have to listen 
to such a message as this from across the 
many centuries and to realize how slow 
has been the growth toward the fact so 
clearly recognized by Job — that righteous- 
ness must be its own sufficient reward. 
"Though he slay me, yet will I wait for 
him," says Job. There was a truth danger- 
ous to neglect in the declaration of the 
older Calvinists of a willingness to be 
damned for the glory of God. That 
gruesome interpretation of God which re- 
quired eternal torture for some, regardless 
of the character of their lives, is well passed 
as an impossible horror of the night. Who 
is prepared to say that it is much inferior 
to a conception of a God that saves by a 
stroke of magic, such as are looking rather 
toward a reward than toward the establish- 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 89 

ment of a Godlike character, and the build- 
ing of a kingdom of heaven among men? 
We haven't gotten far toward the religion 
of the Master until we have thrown over 
the whole system of religious barter and 
reached that happy place where we will do 
right, "though goods and kindred go and 
mortal life also," yea, even though to do 
right means infinite loss, which, of course, 
it ' cannot. That religion can scarcely 
hope to rise above the trivial which expects 
to sell a few poor vain and empty satisfac- 
tions here and gain thereby an eternal 
satisfaction of a similar kind. 

To the Almighty the chief consideration 
cannot be that we are rich or well clothed 
or fare sumptuously every day. Neither 
does he expect immortal souls to be satisfied 
with that sort of program in the life to come. 
The deepest tragedy of our mortal life 
springs from the everlasting ennui of people 
who have things — comforts, pleasures, hon- 
ors, prides — instead of character. The note 
of their wailing pessimism is abroad in the 
land. We need but to ask a question out 
of the depths of our own eternal spirits to 



A 



90 CHRIST AND THE 

realize the emptiness of such satisfactions. 
To have them prolonged for all eternity 
would be to introduce man to a tedious 
world made unending. 

God has set us in the world to learn to 
love him, to love him so much that we will 
want to be like him. He desires in us, not 
a passion to escape a divine wrath, but a 
passion to be like Jesus Christ. Above all, 
he would not have this end in self. He 
wants us to have a passion for the coming 
of the kingdom of Jesus Christ among men. 
He wants every follower a flaming messenger 
to declare the need of man for reconciliation 
with the divine order. He gives no place 
for stop or stay, no place to remember our 
selfish gains or to count our selfish losses 
until that kingdom has come in power. 
We must be good because to be good is to 
be like God. It is to be in full harmony 
with God's world. It is to fulfill the highest 
mission and possibility of one's own spirit. 
It is to bring the greatest possible good to 
the largest number. It is, in the end, to 
make God dwell with men, and to bring 
the day when sorrow and sighing shall flee 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT' 91 

away, injustice shall end, and man shall 
have come into his kingdom. 

A New Note in Christian Teaching 

With such a conception of religion there 
should come a new note in Christian teach- 
ing. The appeal should be made no longer 
to the spirit of barter, but to that which is 
highest and deepest in man. Men need to 
be approached not from the side of personal 
profit, but from the side of eternal righteous- 
ness and duty. To say that the personal- 
profit appeal is the most winning appeal 
is to slander humanity. Men need to be 
told of their own responsibility for the 
present evil conditions of the world. They 
need to be made to see that to take the good 
things of this life and to render inadequate 
return to God is the act of a sneak. They 
need to know that the wrath of God abides 
upon all those who in selfish ease turn aside 
from the divine order of self -surrender. 
The wrath of God rests upon the children 
of disobedience. They need to know that 
there is no subterfuge of convention or 
custom that can excuse them or allow them 



92 CHRIST AND THE 

to escape a righteous judgment upon any 
careless living that allows a large portion 
of society to rot in degradation, poverty, 
and misery. They need to know that 
society demands their best powers, that 
only through the giving of those powers can 
they be the best for those around them, 
that only so can they be true to their own 
best selves. We must hold fast to God 
with the diligence with which the compass- 
less mariner guides his course by an un- 
failing star. Only so can man come into 
the desired haven. The Church of Christ 
has a most wonderful message yet to give, 
and when she gives it generally she w^ill 
come into a new day of power. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 93 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE PLAINS OF PEACE 

The Things that Time and Sense Cannot 
Restore 

There is one fundamental position which 
Job takes toward evil that is good for our 
own aga to consider. He did not blink 
at the hard aspects of the problem thrust 
upon him. He did not fall into the ways 
of modern pessimism by declaring that the 
existence of evil makes empty the hope of a 
righteous God. On the other hand, he 
avoided that idiotic optimism which de- 
clares that evil is an error of mortal mind. 
His problem is fairly put: "God is good, 
yet evil is real, this is the antithesis." 1 
Job attempts no mental gymnastics nor 
moral inconsistencies to hide from himself 
the real problem. 

Eliphaz tells him his righteousness is of 

1 Wenley, Aspects of Pessimism, p. 18. 



94 CHRIST AND THE 

no particular moment to God. His sorrow 
proves him a great sinner. Be converted 
and happy. What is the use of trying to 
maintain his cause? Accept appearances 
and succumb to them! In that moment 
Job cries out for God to judge him. His 
mind is not to be stifled from the recog- 
nition of the problem involved. Even 
though the prosperity of the wicked is but 
temporary, and even though shutting his 
eyes and worshiping an unjust God would 
bring the return of prosperity, who could 
restore for him "the years that the locust 
had eaten"? In a little while Sheol would 
swallow all anyway. Job was coming to 
the point where his friends' idea of happi- 
ness, and the one that had once satisfied 
him, was not large enough. There were 
things that no turn of fortune could restore 
to him. The return of flocks, and herds, 
and servants, and greetings in the market, 
and those high human honors of which he 
had been deprived, would not bring happi- 
ness. The darkness of his doubt was deep- 
ening, but it was the darkness that precedes 
the dawn. There was in his heart the 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 95 

realization that his deepest blessings were 
not, after all, material. There was the 
broken love of a wife that was worse than 
death. There were the silenced voices of 
children, the memory of whose cradle-songs 
wrung his heart. There were things that 
were gone forever, and which no turn of 
fortune could restore, for loss is loss, and 
pain is bitter pain. What can the empty 
years bring to fill again the dashed cup of 
life? That is a superficial view that looks 
on joy as if it were for sale in the market 
place, or could be purchased with gold and 
honors. 

The Thing that Is Better than Happi- 
ness 

' 'There is in man a Higher than Love of 
Happiness: he can do without Happiness, 
and instead thereof find Blessedness." The 
truth thus voiced by Carlyle 1 was the truth 
to which Job was being brought on the 
wings of his troubled experience. The 
faithlessness of his wife, the infidelity of his 
long-trusted friends, had removed from 

1 Sartor Resartus, book ii, chap. ix. 



96 CHRIST AND THE 

him every human prop. There was nothing 
left him in all the universe but God, and his 
friends were trying to rob him of this last 
resource, in order to save their theology. 
No refuge of lies could become the haven 
of his storm-beaten heart. Only a God of 
truth and righteousness could save him 
from ultimate despair. To this he clung 
with desperation. To the witness of his 
own inner soul he clung likewise, and at 
last he learned the comfort of being at one 
with God — the supreme blessedness of fel- 
lowship with God. When he had arrived at 
this Everlasting Yea, neither the disasters 
of time, nor the breaking of his early love, 
nor the false theories and heartlessness of 
his friends could disturb him more. He 
learned that there existed something better 
than happiness, which was joy. 

The whole misconception of the friends 
sprang from a false ideal of joy. They 
identified it with happiness, and happiness 
is a variable quantity in a world of sin. 
Joy may be permanent. Happiness is the 
blessing of a very few. Joy may be the 
possession of every man. Happiness is the 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 97 

goal of small spirits; its search leads into 
the shallows of life, and leaves man even- 
tually disillusioned and despairing. Joy 
grows with the years and the passing of 
experience. Happiness, such as it is, is 
dependent on the things of time and sense. 
It grows with prosperity, attends upon 
the friendly nod of men, but is hopelessly 
eclipsed in the deeper passages of life. The 
current of immortal spirits runs deeper 
than the superficial circumstances of the 
world. If it did not, man would be in no 
wise superior to the passing show of the 
world. Because he is or may be eternal, 
he can rise to higher peace and become the 
master of his soul only as happiness be- 
comes incidental, and he has looked upon 
the face of Joy. 

The Partial Nature of Human 
Experience 

When at last Job had attained to the 
point where he could meet God on the plane 
of mutual relations, the Dreadful Voice 
began to speak to him out of the whirlwind. 
The things disclosed to him were these: 



98 CHRIST AND THE 

He had considered only the mystery of evil. 
Happiness he had taken as the common lot 
and expectation of man. But as he looked 
about him with clearer vision he discovered 
that joy was as difficult and as mysterious 
as evil. Nature, with her singing birds 
and lowing flocks, her seas lifting their 
voice of eternal praise — this was an all but 
universal chorus of joy. In this glad uni- 
verse good and bad, deserving and undeserv- 
ing were invited to partake, and God was 
over all his works, rejoicing in them. 

It is easy for us to project the shadow 
of our sorrow over the universe, or from 
our personal seclusion to talk of the sum 
of human evil as if all the suffering of the 
world could be computed like arithmetical 
factors, and one could come to the positive 
conclusion that the evil outweighs the good. 
But the vanity of all such philosophizing 
can be shown the moment we bring our 
theory to the test of life. The world- 
weary and despondent are very often the 
best fed. The times when men would wel- 
come death, however great their miseries, 
would more than often be dispelled by its 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 99 

recognized approach. Much of our pes- 
simism is but the shadow cast by aimless- 
ness and failure to enter upon one's way 
of moral duty. 

Another fact that was brought home to 
Job with startling clearness by the Voice 
out of the whirlwind was the relative in- 
significance of his sorrow in the vast scheme 
of things. This is a healthful thought for 
any man who sits down to mourn his mis- 
fortune. Had Job suffered? So had count- 
less other men. He was but one unit in a 
world that was too vast for computation. 
Might it not be that in so vast a universe 
he was repining over a single page in the 
book of life, simply because, under his 
human limitations, he had no means of 
reading the other chapters of the book, 
that revealed the plot and ending? Had 
Job not been weak in this, that he had 
yielded to sorrow? He had cursed the day 
of his birth, as if the whole universe were 
centered in his happiness, the whole world 
clouded by his loss. In thus arraigning 
the Eternal Goodness he had not taken a 
worthy position, with his limited knowledge 



100 CHRIST AND THE 

and his own personal story but half read. 
He had conducted himself more like a hire- 
ling than like a hero. The first advice of 
the Voice is "that he stand upon his feet 
like a man." It was time to stop his wail- 
ing like a fretful child, to begin to look his 
sorrow in the face like a man, and to think 
of himself in a world where there were others 
with their hearts of sorrow. 

Understanding Not Necessary to Peace 

And then there came to him out of the 
storm this deeper consciousness, that under- 
standing was not essential to peace. Here 
had been a weakness not only of his friends, 
but a weakness that attends all attempt 
to meet the mystery of suffering with argu- 
ment. Deep sorrow goes beyond the pos- 
sibility of any philosophy to explain. Yet, 
though it may never be intellectually dis- 
cerned, it is not a problem beyond solution. 
If Job's friends had been allies of truth, and 
possessed of the deepest mental insight, 
their efforts would have been but measur- 
ably more successful than they were. It 
is not given to you or me to understand 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 101 

our sorrow. We cannot understand why 
our dearest should have been taken, nor 
why the home of happiness should be broken 
when there are so many that face the con- 
stant tragedy of lovelessness — why sacrifice 
should be met with hate. We cannot 
understand. 

Doubt Not to be Solved Intellectu- 
ally — to Have God Is Enough 

The reason for this is not far to see. 
Paradoxical as it may seem, real doubt is 
not, cannot be, solved intellectually, but 
only by an inner experience of truth. One 
can with all happiness burned out yet learn 
to trust, to serve, to be faithful, to find his 
joy in a new world of sympathy. When, 
upon his ash heap, lonely and disconsolate, 
this truth breaks in upon him, Job cries out, 
"I have heard of thee with the hearing 
of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee." 
Within his heart there blossomed a great 
joy. His soul had arisen at last from the 
ashes of ruin. He had attained the plains 
of peace. In the presence of the living God 
he had the best that life could give; without 



102 CHRIST AND THE 

him every pleasure, every fullness was but 
vanity. We can now understand the claim 
that the fundamental thought of the book 
is "the indestructible personal relationship 
between God and the individual." 1 

Perhaps we ought not to close our con- 
sideration of this greatest poem of literature 
without a summing up of the ground gained. 
The book teaches that no unworthy con- 
ception of God, however deeply engraved 
in custom, belief, habit, or prejudice, can 
remain. Only that which makes for right- 
eousness makes for permanence. So also 
no course of human action, no religion which 
is not founded on this conception, can 
endure the stress of actual life. No com- 
fort to the soul can permanently come from 
a denial of pain, or of the reality of the 
devastations of the years. But above all 
passing joys one may rise into Joy. For 
confirmation of this truth we need only to 
recall the experience of One named the 
Man of Sorrows. In the last hour of his 
life there came what seems like a moment 
of suspense and doubt. The unforgotten 

1 Bunsen, God in History, vol. i, p. 183. 



DBAMAS OF DOUBT 103 

cry of the ages was this: "Why hast thou 
forsaken me?" Happiness was far away — 
happiness of mind or body. But soon there 
came another word — "Into Thy hands . . . 
my spirit." Out of the pain there came the 
peace of his Father's will. 

The message of Job may be read in the 
light of the experience of Jesus. It is a 
living message, not an intellectual one. 
Trust on, trust on "till morning break and 
the shadows flee away." 



THE THIRD STEP 

HAMLET— THE STRUGGLE WITH THE 

PROBLEM OF AN OUTRAGED 

MORAL ORDER 



CHAPTER IX 

THE HEART OF TRAGEDY— PRACTICAL 
DOUBT 

Hamlet's a Practical Doubt 

The doubt of Prometheus sprang from a 
view of God that had by the march of 
events, the lesson of history, become no 
longer tenable. That doubt was answered 
by the appeal to time as able to show an 
eventual reconciliation in which all would 
be made plain. The doubt of Job sprang 
out of the personal suffering of the indi- 
vidual, the finding and explanation of per- 
sonal destiny. This was met by an appeal 
to the probability that a perfect experience 
— the complete view of life — would bring 
the solution of what from the incomplete 
human standpoint must seem irreconcilable 
contradiction. The doubt of Hamlet is of 
another order and one more closely akin 
to the pessimism of our own age. It arose 
107 



108 CHRIST AND THE 

from arrested impulses to moral action, 
which issued in a sense of the futility of life 
as over against its tasks. Hamlet's doubt 
was practical doubt. 

The Story and Problem 

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is called from 
his studies at the University of Wittenberg 
by the sudden death of his father, the king. 
His uncle succeeds to the throne, and within 
two months becomes the husband of his 
late brother's queen. This hasty marriage 
arouses in Hamlet the suspicion of foul 
play in his father's death. This suspicion 
is confirmed by the appearance of his 
father's ghost and by the attitude of the 
guilty king and queen when a strolling band 
of actors presents a similar situation in 
the play which he facetiously names "The 
Mouse-trap." 

When the truth of the situation is made 
clear to him, the one task thrust upon him 
is to discover and expose the crime. In 
this he is met by certain almost insuperable 
obstacles — the power of the king, the ease 
with which he can secure parties to his 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 109 

crimes, the unfaithfulness of the queen- 
mother, the weak falsity of Ophelia, the 
almost complete lack of those who will lend 
support. Added to all this is an evil heart 
of unbelief in Hamlet himself, a propensity 
to soliloquize when most he should act. 
Rather than directing action he is driven 
to action only by the almost irresistible 
current of events. In the end he becomes 
so entangled in the network of intrigue and 
evil that he loses his own life and draws in 
the train of ruin guilty and innocent alike. 
At last the wrong is righted by accident 
rather than by intent. Hamlet finds his 
feeble impulse seconded by that Nemesis 
in the heart of evil by which it works its 
own destruction. 

The heart of Hamlet's tragedy lay in the 
fact that his life did not follow the truth 
which his mind affirmed. He was placed 
over against circumstances to which he 
should have risen superior, but which, on 
the other hand, made him their servant. 
He had faith enough in the technical sense. 
There was no questioning of the creed. He 
would not slay the fratricide at his prayers, 



110 CHRIST AND THE 

lest the magic of the church should save the 
hardened criminal. In a formal way no 
fault could have been found with his mental 
beliefs. His doubt was of that practical 
kind which doubts the divine hand in the 
present action. 

The Unethical Character of Intel- 
lectual Belief 

In this Shakespeare has drawn the picture 
truly. There is a sense in which men are 
not responsible for their convictions. Any 
man who seeks the illumination of the truth- 
is bound to believe what is forced upon him 
as being true. He has no option to say, 
"Thus far I will accept what appears truth, 
and no farther." For the man who can 
commit such a sin against his own indi- 
viduality to save any preconceived notion 
or traditional point of view God reserves a 
special judgment of wrath. He blinds him 
— puts out his intellectual eyes — that 
"seeing" he may "see, and shall not per- 
ceive." It becomes an act of folly, then, 
to assail men for their intellectual beliefs, 
even though they be in error. Their par- 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 111 

ticular viewpoint, and ours as well, may be 
due to the bias of prejudice, training, 
temperament, predisposition. Opinions 
spring both from knowledge and from 
ignorance. There are only two questions 
that we have a right to ask: one is, "Does 
this opinion square with what we know of 
life?", and, second, "What is its practical 
utility to make men better?" 

In the past the chief consideration has 
been given to the theoretical or intellectual 
doubter. When we speak the words "skep- 
ticism," "unbelief," "infidelity," we refer 
invariably to men who fail to solve intel- 
lectual problems. By these terms we mean 
men whose chief difficulty is with the creed, 
or with the miracles, or in the interpretation 
of the being or person of God. In this we 
make a disastrous mistake. By it we often 
shut out the purest souls and the most 
earnest seekers after God, while we keep 
within the pale some who either have never 
thought deeply or are willing to commit 
mental dishonesty for a consideration. In- 
tellectual clearness and faith are very 
important factors in a Christian life, but 



112 CHRIST AND THE 

they are by no means the most impor- 
tant. Intellectual honesty, on the other 
hand, is closely akin to spiritual power, 
and cannot be divorced from it. He who 
to-day holds an honest opinion sincerely 
may be only a pilgrim of truth on the way to 
spiritual power. If men had to wait until 
they were intellectually clear on all the 
points of doctrine before surrendering their 
lives to the perfect service which is freedom, 
this would be a most unfortunate world, 
and none could be saved. Intellectual 
doubts are not the necessary evidences of 
impiety. We need continually to remind 
ourselves of the unethical character of a 
great deal of the intellectual doubt that for 
a period sways the minds of men. When 
certain facts arise above the horizon of con- 
viction, the man must yield himself to them 
so far as they go, or until further reflection 
and experience show them to be unworthy. 
But there could be no coming to the truth 
at all if men were never to trust themselves 
forth upon the perilous sea of new ideas and 
discoveries. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 113 

The Insidious Nature of Practical 
Doubt 

We need to strike a clearer note upon 
the insidious character of practical doubt. 
There are great hosts of people who, like 
Hamlet, take comfort from seeing the truth, 
but who likewise fail to come to a knowledge 
of the truth through actual experience. 
Theoretical unbelief, if honestly held, and 
with open mind toward any new light that 
may come, is not a matter over which to 
waste much care. There is an unbelief, 
however, that is fatal; that is the unbelief 
which displays itself by departing from the 
living God. It is insidious in this, that it is 
often the sin of the man who is without 
intellectual doubt, and who therefore 
dreams himself secure in the faith. His 
intensity with respect to intellectual belief 
is often in direct proportion to his de- 
parture from living faith. 

A man once confessed that in a certain 
period of his life he had been not only 
wicked but vile in his wickedness. He 
added to the recital that from which he 



114 CHRIST AND THE 

took great comfort: In the midst of all his 
wickedness he had never lost his faith. 
Such a definition of faith was surely in need 
of revision. However much we may dislike 
to admit it, what we intellectually believe 
is no particular religious credit to us. Our 
faith in Christ will be measured exactly by 
the fruits of Christ that appear in us. By 
that supreme test we must stand or fall. 
Hamlet was a practical doubter, though a 
theoretical believer. He saw his duty and 
took great comfort from seeing it. He 
knew there was a grievous wrong to right. 
He deplored the fact that he was set in the 
whirlpool of action. He tried to appease 
the conscience within him by upbraiding 
the faithless queen, by unmasking the 
murderous king, by insulting the character- 
less Ophelia, and by the accidental killing 
of the doddering Polonius. He was forever 
delaying to face things as they were, and 
to make insistent demands upon life. He 
went at his task with the moral cowardice 
that decided the parson not to attack the 
liquor interests which were debauching 
the life of his village because he was bent 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 115 

upon character-building and the spiritual 
care of his people. The rampant unbelief 
of the intellectual scoffer may slay its thou- 
sands, but this practical sort of unbelief 
slays its tens of thousands. 

The Modern Lesson in Hamlet's 
Problem 

Thus the heart of Hamlet's tragedy may 
be seen to be close to the tragedy of modern 
life. This tragedy is now being realized 
through wide circles. The terrible con- 
tradiction of which men are becoming con- 
scious in modern life is the possibility of 
being satisfied with a purely external or 
intellectual form of religion. This was a 
question which was likewise preeminent 
in Shakespeare's own age. We may state 
with great positiveness our beliefs in the 
tenets of Christian faith, but what if we 
take our religion out in the lazy comfort 
of saying it? What if our age of supposed 
culture, religion, intellectual attainment, 
shall for the most part stand idly by and 
see the tides of immorality and crime flow 
unchecked? What answer is the age to 



116 CHRIST AND THE 

make to the cry of the benighted childhood 
of the tenements? Of what use is our cul- 
ture while men and women lose their footing 
and drop to ruin through the savage com- 
petitions of our commercial age? What 
gift can we put into the hand of the Al- 
mighty which shall compensate him for 
those blasting inequalities that mar our 
civilization? What if we say we believe 
in Jesus Christ, and in a million toiling 
marts neglect the children of his love, and 
thus crucify him afresh in this modern age 
and put him to an open shame? We, like 
Hamlet, are set upon times which it is our 
business to put right. We may long for 
the good old days of intellectual ease, if 
there were any, but we are in the midst of 
our clamorous problem, and in how we 
meet it or neglect it is our rise or fall. 
Practical unbelief is more fatal, more damn- 
ing in its results than any other. Intel- 
lectual unbelief is important only in this, 
that when men become parties to it, holding 
it against light, it leads to the darker un- 
belief of practice. But this is likewise the 
end of that faith which testifies, "Lord, 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 117 

Lord," but does not the will of God. Prac- 
tical unbelief is the more insidious in that 
it can exist alongside of a calm, self-con- 
tented mind and can keep house with a so- 
called religious ecstasy. 

The Divine Nemesis 

It will be a most unhappy experience for 
our age if, like Hamlet, instead of directing 
our course, we shall be compelled to blunder 
into its solution. In the heart of every 
evil custom and of every human wrong the 
Almighty has placed the elements of its 
own undoing. This is "the heart of good 
in all things evil" by which God brings 
his day of eventual righteousness. 

One has suggested 1 that Hamlet's hes- 
itancy arose from extreme conscientious- 
ness in the midst of the unconscientious. 
This is in part true. The task was thrust 
upon him because of all that company about 
the court he was the one who was aware of 
the moral issues involved. To become 
conscious of moral issues is to be burdened 



Ford, Shakespeare's Hamlet: A New Theory. 



118 CHRIST AND THE 

with a task. To neglect that task is to 
suffer moral shipwreck. 

Upon this age, as upon no other, has come 
the consciousness of an existing moral and 
social disorder. The problem will be settled 
in God's good time. No unrighteousness 
can permanently remain. Let us utter 
the fervent hope that our age may be saved 
from the tragedy that ever attends the 
prevalence of practical doubt. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 119 



CHAPTER X 

THE TASK BEYOND THE POWERS 

The Stupendous Character of Ham- 
let's Task 

Goethe 1 has called attention to the 
stupendous character of the task that was 
thrust upon Hamlet by circumstance. "It 
is quite clear to me," he says, "that what 
Shakespeare wished to portray was this: 
a great task imposed upon a soul which 
was incompetent to perform that task." 2 

The first shock to Hamlet was the loss 
of his father in the vigor and strength of his 
manhood. Then in quick succession came 
the loss of his kingdom, the discovery of the 
real character of his uncle, and, greatest 
of all, the loss of love and respect for his 
mother. Her complicity in the murder 
of his father, her incestuous union with the 
dead husband's brother, the utter lack of 

1 Goethe, On Shakespeare, p. 30. 2 Id., p. 31. 



120 CHRIST AND THE 

restraint, even of the appearance of decency, 
suddenly took out of his life the natural 
props and assurances so necessary to the 
peace of youth. Wherever he turned he 
found himself forced back by the deep- 
lying intrigue and falsity that had become 
the very atmosphere of the court. Apart 
from Horatio, there was no friend he could 
trust. The wicked king, by reason of 
wickedness and strength, seemed to possess 
every power over him, being able to bribe 
every friend and to accomplish through 
the hands of others what he would not dare 
to do with his own hands. There was the 
absence of those proofs of the king's guilt 
which would enable him to secure redress 
in legal ways. The king had the advantage 
which is always possessed by the unscrupu- 
lous in power. Even the heartbreak of a 
false mother might have been partially 
atoned for if Ophelia had proved herself a 
true woman. But here again fate was 
against him. Ophelia was the child of the 
court, and strong characters could not grow 
up in the midst of such surroundings. The 
innocence of immoral surroundings can be 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 121 

scarcely better than unmoral. She could 
not discover in the life of her father and of 
the court that adherence to moral principles 
that would have given her character. It 
was because, though innocent, she was 
characterless that she was the easy dupe 
of the influences around her which were 
working for the undoing of her lover. It 
was because of this lack of character, which 
became more and more evident with the 
advent of every crisis in affairs, that Hamlet 
became estranged from her. He was cast 
upon the deepest days of his life. He was 
surrounded by a living tragedy. She who 
should have been his helpmate had been 
so trained that she could not even realize 
the forces that were driving his life forward 
as by the Furies. It was useless to upbraid 
Hamlet for his coarseness and lack of re- 
finement toward her. It was Shakespeare's 
way of telling us that there were not in 
Ophelia those qualities which under the 
trying stress of the situation could command 
Hamlet's respect. Ophelia was the last 
human refuge of Hamlet's life, save only 
the old college mate, Horatio. Everything 



m CHRIST AND THE 

was against him. To rectify the moral 
disorder of the court of Denmark demanded 
that he suppress all the finer feelings of 
his life, say good-by to the love of mother, 
sweetheart, thronging memories of the past, 
and literally "take up arms against a sea 
of troubles" in the full consciousness of out- 
ward failure and misunderstanding. He 
could scarcely make the first move without 
the forfeit of his life, and even though he 
gave his life, there would seem to be no 
promise that he would succeed in reforming 
the conditions of the court. He would 
be simply the disagreeable reformer put 
out of the way, whose absence meant the 
securer reign of evil. "To act and to love 
are the twin functions of the human soul." 1 
These functions were denied to Hamlet 
by circumstance, and these have been 
well said to have lain at the heart of his 
tragedy and despair. He was called to 
great tasks and called without that surety 
of confidence which was necessary if he 
were to meet them greatly. A man of 
letters, of retiring disposition, a lover of 

1 Pavid Starr Jordan, The Philosophy of Despair, p. 32. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 123 

peace and order, of poetic and dreamy 
temperament, his very learning had robbed 
him of the certainties that would have been 
strength to a less cultured man. Over his 
life was blown the bugle of desperate war, 
the demand of an overwhelming task, and 
the contest threatened to be won or lost 
before he could select the battleground 
of action. At every point in this task he 
was hurled back defeated because of his 
own uncertainty of mind and hesitancy of 
action. Where he should have had the 
bulwark of a strong love he was likewise 
disappointed. This fact added to his prob- 
lem and increased his despair. 

The Pessimism of Modern Life Like 
that of Hamlet 

Because we are trying to get at the prob- 
lem of despair from the modern standpoint 
I cannot pass without calling attention to 
the close analogy of this despair of Hamlet 
with that of the present day. This is 
especially pronounced in the industrial and 
business life of our age. Good men are con- 
versant with the inequalities that oppress 



124 CHRIST AND THE 

society. They are not unaware of the moral 
issues at stake. But they are struck 
through with hopelessness at a task which 
seems to be beyond their powers. If they 
do in business and industry the things that 
they feel would be the plain command of 
the spirit of the Master, they think they 
would be sounding their own death knell. 
They would hasten to ameliorate the con- 
dition of their employees but for the fact 
that the competition of the unrighteous 
would soon drive them altogether from the 
field. A host of men do not anxiously 
desire an unjust share of the rewards of 
industry, and would be satisfied if con- 
ditions could be brought about that would 
insure fair profits to all. But immediately 
there arise before them the seemingly in- 
superable conditions of environment. They 
are like Hamlet, the victims of a system 
they do not love, and which they have not 
the moral strength to oppose. 

The feeling of their being cast up against 
a problem that seems beyond practical 
solution, which so far has been solved only 
in the vagaries of imagination, is in large 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 125 

part responsible for the pessimism of mqdern 
life. This pessimistic note, present with 
many of the best, is caught up by the 
avaricious and the wicked, and is made as 
a watch-cry of truth for the lowest elements 
of society. All business is denounced as 
being dishonest — as necessarily dishonest — 
and this is made the excuse for every iniq- 
uity. The political world is looked upon 
as the field for public exploitation for the 
benefit of the individual, and from this 
watch-cry the ward heeler gathers new 
effrontery. In the social world it is the 
same. Social inequalities are declared to 
be beyond remedy, wherefore a considerable 
portion of society gives itself over to cheap 
pleasure and lewdness that only accentuate 
the tragic and unholy inequalities of the 
present social state. Such is the pessimism 
of the present, and a little consideration 
will show how close of kin it is with that 
which filled the soul of the hapless Hamlet. 
It is not without significance that Shake- 
speare represents Hamlet to be secure by 
his uncle's choice and favor in the succession 
to the throne. He has only to accommodate 



126 CHRIST AND THE 

himself to things as they are. He has only 
to soothe the pangs of conscience with the 
thought that the things that need to be 
remedied are beyond his power to change, 
and that therefore he cannot be held re- 
sponsible. He has only to submit quietly 
to things as they are and all desired happi- 
ness — the throne, Ophelia, and a chance 
in coming years to reform the rotten court — 
will be his. It was at this point that Ham- 
let managed to save the last vestige of 
his moral self-respect. He would not sub- 
mit to receive the recompense of evil; and 
this is why, in spite of all weakness and 
indecision, we love him. He would not 
consent to the murder of his soul for the 
sake of gain. There is scarcely a thinking 
man or woman in modern life who will not 
sense at once the application of this situation 
to our problems. How shall we cease to be 
partakers by profit in the wrongs of society, 
the cruel injustices that are forced upon 
helpless children, women, and men? This 
is the disconcerting question of our age. 
It is like the question which Hamlet 
faced. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 127 

Moral Paralysis in the Face of Tasks 

"Were it not that the contradictions of 
life had found ally within Hamlet himself, 
they could not have overborne him thus. 
'We are always accomplices in the evils 
that oppress us.' This inner reply, as it 
may be called, to outward questionings, 
is best seen in relation to that 'pale cast of 
thought' traditionally associated with our 
hero. . . . His vivid realization of the 
absolute value, yet comparative ineffective- 
ness of man, constitutes his affinity for the 
evil without, and renders him the more easy 
prey to adverse circumstances. His irony 
is of the highest importance in that it 
springs from his central being, and almost 
invariably sways him when in society. In 
solitude his candor with himself borders 
upon the awful. When he soliloquizes he 
reveals not a little of that knowledge which 
is the root of his bitterness." 1 

It was just this inner contradiction that 
was the cause of the moral and spiritual 
paralysis of Hamlet in the face of his tasks. 

1 Wenley, Aspects of Pessimism, pp. 104, 105. 



128 CHRIST AND THE 

He was not clear in his own mind regarding 
which way duty lay. He allowed himself 
to be too largely influenced by the fact that 
he had no show of success. He had not 
risen to the higher plane of unquestioning 
sacrifice where alone could have been found 
the solution of his problem. He was the 
victim of circumstances in this deeper sense, 
that at no point had he the necessary moral 
courage to rise superior to them. We are 
so constituted that God does not put great 
weapons in our hands to fight the world 
until we have begun to make use of the 
weapons already given. This is the secret 
of Jesus's life. So small a gap is there be- 
tween utter failure and great success. Had 
he rejected that apparent setting of all 
hopes, the cross, he would not have been 
crowned with the glory and honor of the 
ages. Any refusal to do the nearest and 
most obvious duty, because it appears to 
offer no ultimate solution, or because it 
promises to put an end to all effort, is a 
compromise with the moral nature which 
brings swift decay and results in the paraly- 
sis of the moral powers. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 129 

The Sense of God in the Moral Order 

The inner contradictions of Hamlet's 
heart could have been solved by the presence 
of one element which was lacking. His 
great lack was a lack of belief in the moral 
order of the universe, and this not in its 
abstract aspect alone. He was wanting 
in a firm sense of that divine Righteousness 
through the ages moving on, which would 
bring to naught every evil device. He was 
further unsure of its application to the 
society of his age. He believed too much 
in the evil of his world, he rated too highly 
the power of the wicked king, he believed 
too much in the power of that king to con- 
trol the court and the kingdom. No man 
can be strong and fearless against the evils 
of society who does not realize the inherent 
weakness of evil and the inherent goodness 
of men. A Hamlet of this sort would have 
been a hero and a redeemer. The high 
ramparts of wrong, in spite of all appear- 
ances and reports to the contrary, are 
exceedingly vulnerable to the shafts of a 
disinterested righteousness. This fact of 



130 CHRIST AND THE 

the moral order of the world was too much 
for Hamlet's faith. In such a situation 
as his the only salvation was a keen sense of 
the overruling power of the Almighty, and 
in this he was lacking. This was the source 
of his weakness and his tragedy. No age 
nor time can conquer its weaknesses nor 
set its moral house in order which is wanting 
in this practical sense of God. It was of 
this consciousness that Lowell sang in words 
that stirred the heart of a nation to its 
depth : 

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on 

the throne, 
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind 

the dim unknown, 
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch 

above his own. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 131 



CHAPTER XI 

THE UNLIT LAMP AND THE UNGIRT LOIN 

The Harvest of Irresolution 

In "The Statue and the Bust" Browning 
has represented the great sin of two people 
as not so much a contemplated crime as 
the wasting and throwing away of life by 
reason of such continued contemplation: 

The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 
Is the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, 
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say. 

The preeminent sin of Hamlet was the 
sin of "the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin." 
The harvest of such an irresolution is often 
as grievous as the harvest of sin. Some- 
times in its power to involve others it be- 
comes even more grievous. It is a truth of 
which we should assure ourselves that in 
morals and religion to will feebly is often as 
disastrous as not to will at all. Especially 
does this become true in times of change 



ISt CHRIST AND THE 

and action. The open enemy of righteous- 
ness is limited in his power for evil by the 
very knowledge which men possess of his 
purposes. The weak-willed friend of right- 
eousness intrusted with great issues, by 
reason of a false confidence imposed upon 
his good nature, often defeats by an in- 
active weakness measures that an avowed 
evil could not defeat. This element is too 
often overlooked in life. We often give 
ourselves the full credit of half-formed 
intentions that have no hold on life. We 
intend to be good, therefore we call our- 
selves good. We intend to be holy, there- 
fore we call ourselves holy. We intend to 
serve God, to be unselfish, to surrender our 
lives to the cause of humanity, and in- 
stantly puff ourselves up with pride at our 
good intentions. Too often it passes in the 
place of righteousness. 'Tis true that only 
a shallow mind ean be thus easily pleased 
with mere dreams, but there are many shal- 
low minds among fallible human beings. 
The message of religious institutions has 
too often been directed to the pleasure and 
comfort of such. It is the danger whenever 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 133 

religious or moral duties become either 
predominantly formal or emotional or in- 
tellectual. The good intentions that filled 
the hours of Hamlet's wakefulness did not 
particularly change the harvest of evil which 
sprang from his inaction. 

The killing of the king at his prayers, 
in the beginning of the play, would at least 
have cast the moral issue before the court, 
and would have given the opportunity to 
unmask the evildoer. To live alongside 
of it allowed it to fester and grow till 
Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes, Rosencranz and 
Guildenstern were corrupted and drawn into 
the common ruin with him. What might 
have been a short and quickly passed issue 
between himself and the king lengthened 
out until it involved the whole court. This 
is the eternal result of temporizing with evil. 
Unless denounced it sends its poison through 
the whole body. 

The Common Ruin of Guilty and 
Innocent 

This formed not a small part of Hamlet's 
pessimism and difficulty. On every side, 



134 CHRIST AND THE 

and daily, it was given him to witness the 
fruitage of his cowardly inaction. First 
it was Polonius, then Rosencranz and 
Guildenstern, then Ophelia whose going 
brought the problem home with an intensi- 
fied force to his sensitive soul. 

This problem arising from the social 
dependence of individuals is not only one 
of the great elements of Hamlet's pessim- 
ism; it is largely accountable for that of our 
age. Why the innocent should be involved 
in the ruin of the guilty is the question which, 
taken in the abstract, is past finding out. 
There is no use to criticize Shakespeare for 
Ophelia's unjust doom. It is a charge not 
against Shakespeare, but against life. Un- 
less we can find some solution for it, or at 
least can lift it into a light where solution 
may be seen to be possible, we shall wander 
as did Hamlet, lost in the maze of things 
as they are. In the light of this fact it 
will be seen that it is not enough for us to 
maintain an unmoral or an unreligious 
attitude toward society. Neither is it 
sufficient for us to be mildly moral or mildly 
religious. Such an attempt has much the 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 135 

force of an effort to be partially virtuous. 
We cannot say what ruin we shall bring not 
only upon ourselves but also upon society 
and those whose lives we touch. The unlit 
lamp may create a darkness that shall 
blind many souls. The ungirt loin may 
keep back in a great host the coming of the 
kingdom. To let the moral questions of 
our age go unanswered, to put our lives 
but mildly or not at all into the struggle 
for the reign of righteousness, to allow the 
institutions that make for righteousness to 
go unsupported by us, because of anxiety 
for this world's gains, is to be not so far 
removed from those actively engaged in the 
spread of evil. Those whom Jesus con- 
demned in the parable of the last judgment 
were not accused of active evil, but only 
of refraining from active good. This is 
the constant theme of the gospel. The 
outer darkness is no less dark by reason of 
unfulfilled good intentions. The doom is 
the same: "Depart from me, ye workers of 
iniquity." 



136 CHRIST AND THE 

Indifference to Moral Questions 
Inexcusable 

There can be no employment of life of 
sufficient importance to excuse any man 
from taking his moral stand. His intel- 
lectual attitudes, his prejudices, his dis- 
covery of inconsistencies in the institutions 
of reform — none of these form an adequate 
excuse for inaction. Had Hamlet struck 
his blow like a man instead of weighing 
forever, and balancing the possibilities be- 
tween good and bad, he might have saved 
his world, his kingdom, and his soul. 

To Lose the Soul — What Does It Mean? 

What may it mean, then, to lose one's 
soul? This was a question which much 
concerned Hamlet. How did he work out 
the answer in life? He was held back from 
the way of duty by an extreme conscien- 
tiousness which feared to offend the higher 
powers. At the same time this conscien- 
tiousness erred by reason of being more 
formal and superficial than deep-principled. 
His conscience was one that was largely the 
product of his times. We may discover 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 137 

some day that it is not sufficient to ask 
whether a man is conscientious. It is 
pertinent to ask what is the standard of 
his conscience? Is it bent on trifles, the 
weighing of mint, anise, and cummin? Is 
it lacking in human breadth and sympathy? 
Is it dominated by selfishness? Is it the 
reflex of a petty life and small interests? 
Is it born out of a low stage of civilization? 
Is it the product of an impartial culture? 
The wildest orgies, the utmost atrocities of 
history have been committed in the name 
of conscience. Persecuting flames that 
denied the very nature of God, refinements 
of cruelty have been constantly committed 
in all good conscience. In good conscience 
Paul held the garments of those who stoned 
the sainted Stephen. In good conscience 
he breathed out threatenings against the 
saints in Judsea and abroad. When learn- 
ing what a man's conscience may or may 
not permit him to do, it is important to 
inquire what his standard of righteousness 
is. And in attempting to enforce our own 
conscience on others we should look nar- 
rowly to our own ways. 



138 CHRIST AND THE 

One may blind and deaden his conscience 
to the real moral issues of life to such extent 
that, seeming to pursue the way of life, he 
follows the way of death. And this blind- 
ness and indifference to the moral outcome 
of one's own life and day, however much it 
may be attended by a superficial conscience 
— this blindness and indifference is the loss 
of the soul. To take no side in the face of 
moral tasks, and to persist, is to kill the soul 
beyond the repair of magic of church, or 
priest, or doctrine of truth. 

Hamlet's Salvation in the Existence 
of a Moral Order 

Hamlet's salvation comes late. The rea- 
son for his terrible failure is, as before 
pointed out, lack of confidence in the moral 
order of the world. At the same time that 
he has been procrastinating and wondering 
what he shall do, a Divine Nemesis has been 
at work bringing the solution. The very 
excess of wickedness is making way for the 
coming of a better order. The unchecked 
king and the wicked queen are their own 
undoing. The wicked and unworthy 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 139 

dynasty fills its cup of wrath and is blotted 
out of existence. This end Hamlet has had 
but little part in preparing. It has been 
more in the capacity of a "puppet of God" 
than by his own volition. His soul is 
saved from utter ruin only by the fact of 
his abhorrence of evil and his refusal to 
be content with it. In that last action 
at the grave of Ophelia, though in passion, 
the pent up impulses of the soul find release, 
and there breaks upon his astonished vision 
in the approach of Fortinbras with his 
army across the plain, the truth — of which 
to that moment he had been skeptical — 
that God was in his world working good out 
of evil and turning to good the weak vacil- 
lations of one who, though feeble in action, 
would not wrong the heart of truth. He 
bequeaths to Rosencranz the task which 
has been too much for him. There had 
been so much to do, so little done. Upon 
Rosencranz must fall the friendly duty of 
making clear to the world, out of all the 
surrounding confusions, the purity of Ham- 
let's intentions, and then, "The rest is 
silence." 



THE FOURTH STEP 

FAUST— THE STRUGGLE WITH THE 
PROBLEM OF REDEMPTION 



CHAPTER XII 

A PROBLEM OF UNPARDONABLE SIN 

The Difficulty of Analysis of Goethe's 
Work 

If we were setting out to scale one of the 
White Hills, we should study the map, 
locate the trails, put up our lunch, and 
a few hours of tramping would bring us 
to any desired point. If we were trying 
for the summit of McKinley in the Canadian 
Rockies, not only would our preparation 
be more complicated and toilsome, but the 
arrival at the goal itself would be much 
in question. The dramas of doubt which we 
have studied up to the present were of far 
more simple and accessible nature than is 
Goethe's Faust. Each of these was written 
to set forth some particular phase or phases 
of doubt. The drama before us defies such 
simple analysis and classification. We may 
in this discussion climb some single peak, 

143 



144 CHRIST AND THE 

catch some vista as through a window, 
but we may not pretend that there are not 
loftier peaks that you may already have dis- 
covered, deeper and higher truths than here 
set down. This difficulty and diversity 
is due to the peculiar nature of this drama. 
It lacks unity because it sets forth not an 
idea nor a philosophy but a life. It has 
certain great, strong, and noble points be- 
cause these were elements of Goethe's char- 
acter. Its points of weakness, likewise, 
are those reflected from the life of its author. 
The drama was first projected in his mind 
at the age of twenty. It was not completed 
until he was past eighty, and within seven 
months of his death, when he felt the great 
night drawing on. 

The Story 

The original Faust story upon the lips 
of the German peasants was a story of sin 
from which there could be no redemption. 
It was a part of the popular speculation 
upon the unpardonable sin. It is found 
in other stories like Tannh'auser and Par- 
acelsus. It was the expression of that 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 145 

skepticism which arose from a sense of the 
condition of a sinner who had deliberately 
sinned against light; of whom the Scripture 
declared there was no place for repentance, 
though he sought it carefully and with 
tears. 

This material which Goethe found in 
popular literature and drama he made his 
own, working from it the masterpiece that 
will evermore be linked with his name. 
For him the Margaret motif was but in- 
cidental to the greater work, but because 
of its living interest it has become pre- 
dominant in the popular mind. Goethe's 
concern was with the salvation of Faust, 
but this part is read by the few. 

The drama opens, like the book of Job, 
with a prologue in heaven in which Satan 
appears before the Lord, referring in a 
cynical way to the integrity of Faust and 
offering to wager that he can be seduced. 

What will you bet? There's still a chance to gain 

him, 
If unto me full leave you give, 
Gently upon my road to train him! 1 

1 Here, as elsewhere, Bayard Taylor's translation is used. 



146 CHRIST AND THE 

As in Job, the Lord gives Satan power 
to test Faust, but declares he cannot be 
seduced, because 

A good man through obscurest aspiration, 
Has still an instinct of the one true way. 

Aspiration, or striving for something 
better, is the key to Goethe's treatment 
of the problem of life, as it is also to the 
salvation of Faust. Faust comes before 
us in the mental condition of Dante in 
the opening of the Divine Comedy. Mid- 
way of this mortal life he is discovered in 
the wilderness of disillusionment from earlier 
dreams. Wearied and disappointed with 
the results of a life of study and research, 
he is about to end all with poison when 
through his window float the strains of the 
cathedral bells, and the Easter anthem, 
"Christ is arisen!" Memories of childhood 
and days of simple faith rise up to divert 
him from the contemplated suicide. Un- 
satisfied with a knowledge of books, he 
turns to enjoy the fresh flowing life of the 
villagers, only to realize the unspanned 
gulf which his study has set between him 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 147 

and them. He turns to his Bible, but opens 
to the first chapter of the Gospel of John 
and meets this mystical phrase, "In the 
beginning was the Word." He finds him- 
self more puzzled than ever. His inde- 
cision is voiced in the words, 

What from the world have I to gain? 
Thou shalt abstain — renounce — refrain! 
That is the everlasting song 
That in the ears of all men rings — 
That unrelieved, our whole life long, 
Each hour, in passing, hoarsely sings. 

Then it is that, finding his house empty, 
swept, and garnished, Satan enters in. 
Under his direction, Faust plunges for 
satisfaction into the life of the senses, 
making a compact to be his forever, if 
there shall come in human experience a 
moment to which he shall say, "Ah, still 
delay — thou art so fair." Then comes the 
meeting with Margaret and the terrible 
consequences that follow in the wake of sin. 
Does anyone know a more powerfully writ- 
ten illustration of the truth that sin bring- 
eth forth death? Margaret's family, her 
mother, brother, and child die violent 



148 CHRIST AND THE 

deaths as the result of her sin. She at 
last, insane and in prison, by renouncing her 
sin, refusing to escape its penalty, deciding 
to be done with all falsehood forever, and 
appealing to the merciful judgment of God, 
is received into everlasting habitations, a 
sinner saved. So ends the first part of the 
drama. 

But the road for Faust is traversed 
only from heaven to hell. The distance 
has yet all to be traversed from hell to 
heaven. He knows not now, and perhaps 
is never to know, Margaret's road of re- 
pentance. He travels out into the night, 
but his sin has not been one of impulse. 
Deliberately planned and plotted, in league 
with evil itself, where shall he find place for 
repentance? 

He seeks redemption in culture and travel, 
but finds it not; then in the exercise of fame 
and power, and finds it not. In extreme 
age, when Care has entered at his door with 
blindness, while Want and Necessity linger 
at the threshold, he learns at last that man 
can be happy only as he loses life for others. 
In almost the last moment life begins to 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 149 

turn on the rusted hinges of unselfishness. 
At that moment he comes to a satisfaction 
that has heretofore been denied him. He 
utters the fateful words, "Ah, still delay — 
thou art so fair!" 

Satan claims him, but can do nothing 
because the thing that has come ultimately 
to satisfy has partaken of the eternal nature. 
Angels bear away the spiritual part of 
Faust. Margaret, the glorified penitent, 
appears with a great company of the 
heavenly host to sing his welcome home, 
and the drama closes with the mystic 
chorus — 

All things transitory 

But as symbols are sent: 
Earth's insufficiency 

Here grows to event : 
The Indescribable, 
Here it is done: 
The woman-soul leadeth us 
Upward and on! 

The Problem 

In taking up the study of Faust it is 
important to an understanding of it that 
we remember always that Mephistopheles 



150 CHRIST AND THE 

is the externalization of the subjective mind 
of Faust himself. 1 He has not the same 
character as the Satan of Job. He is the 
warring, rebelling spirit of man himself 
rather than an external personality. He 
is the worse nature of Faust. This Goethe 
has attempted to make clear in the very 
beginning, when Satan is introduced to 
Faust's room as a poodle that finally takes 
the form of a traveling scholar. It is a 
convenient way of avoiding soliloquy 2 and 
increasing the dramatic interest and effect. 
So long as Faust refused him place, so long 
his skepticism remained academic, but 
when he enters into a pact with his worse 
nature to follow its bidding in the pursuit 
of knowledge, the better Faust loses con- 
trol, and in its train comes the possibility 
of harm to others. 3 

Intellectual Aspect of the Problem 

Faust's problem was, first of all, intel- 
lectual. It arose from the vain hope of 

1 Davidson, Philosphy of Faust, p. 16. 

2 Masson, Three Devils, p. 39. 

3 Davidson, id., above, p. 22. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 151 

satisfying the soul with knowledge. Faust 
is hoping to discover God through the in- 
tuitions of the mind. Great impulses had 
been given to the doctrine of the unity of 
life and nature. It seemed possible on the 
one hand to trace to material sources the 
very processes and results of thought, while 
on the other hand was the insistent demand 
for a God who was resident in nature. On 
this basis it is not only impossible to arrive 
at the knowledge of God, but, as was shown 
by Thomas Hill Green so long ago, it is im- 
possible to arrive at any intellectual cer- 
tainty, to know that one's impressions of 
the external world are true. 

Faust rejects the pi atonic view of the 
world when he turns from the interpre- 
tation, "In the beginning was the Word" 
and in its place substitutes the Aristotelian, 
"In the beginning was the Act." Herein 
lay the source of his doubt and also the 
incompleteness of his final answer to the 
problem. If we have only "In the begin- 
ning an Act," there is no further need for a 
directing personality behind the universe. 
"Already a Creator is superfluous — the 



152 CHRIST AND THE 

Act is all; no Eternal Reason now, no 
Essential Energy — a mere ebb and flow of 
Becoming." 1 Such a God is without per- 
sonal relations to man, so that no amount 
of searching through the tomes of dusty 
books, or even through "Being's flood or 
action's storm," can ever draw him nearer. 
This was the standpoint and the source of 
skepticism both of Faust and of Goethe. 
In the youthful Faust Goethe was stating 
his own problem. The only adequate solu- 
tion of it was the recognition of a directing 
Personality. This Goethe is compelled at 
the end to drag in by main force, after 
having denied it throughout his argument. 
Despite a great deal of fine talk about 
communing with a God of nature, it is true 
that man communes with his own spirit 
in her darker, deeper, and sublimer pres- 
ences. In the last analysis she is meaning- 
less altogether if she be not the purposeful 
manifestation of a Divine Mind. The ser- 
mon that is preached by running brooks 
varies with the intellectual and spiritual 
caliber of the audience, and will be no ser- 

1 Coupland, Spirit of Faust, p. 85. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 153 

mon at all to one of undeveloped spiritual 
nature. To the deep nature the physical 
universe speaks deep thoughts of God, to 
the shallow nature it speaks not at all. 
Each receives back glorified, and sanctified 
perhaps, only that which he has brought, 
for nature is nothing apart from man, her 
crown and her consummation. Man him- 
self is a lonely, inexplicable tragedy, except 
as behind nature there is a directing Per- 
sonality, a Mind that can fellowship with 
his. This was the one element which 
Faust failed to bring to the world of knowl- 
edge, and, later, to the world of nature. 
Hence there should be no surprise that in 
searching a supposedly aimless universe 
one should return on one's weary way dis- 
appointed and in despair. 

The Spiritual Aspect of the Problem 

There was also a deep spiritual lack 
which prepared the way and was the basis 
of Faust's pessimism. This was notice- 
ably lacking in Goethe's own outlook on 
the world. He adapted the Spinozian 
ethics, in which the good was that which 



154 CHRIST AND THE 

was certainly useful and the bad was that 
which would certainly hinder from the 
attainment of good. Goethe's theory of 
life was particularly lacking in the sense of 
God as an element of moral consciousness. 
The same want that hid God in a universe 
of change, of ebb and flow, as the Unknow- 
able, kept from him the deeper solution 
of the moral problem. It is unfair to call 
Faust a pagan, for pagans are supersti- 
tiously religious. Faust's superstitions bent 
the other way. Goethe sought to enlarge 
and deepen his own life by summoning to 
it everything good, beautiful, and true. 
He diligently sought to keep out of it all 
that suggested tragedy. He refused to look 
upon the funeral cortege of a dead friend. 
But only he can come to life's fullest measure 
of joy and of discipline who fairly faces 
the deepest tragedy life can bring. In this 
failure it is easy to discover that peculiar 
indifference to others which made tragic 
the lives of those that lived closest to 
Goethe. The same fountains of the heart 
in Faust sent forth the bitter waters of 
Margaret's misery. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 155 

This peculiar lack of spiritual conscious- 
ness was manifested in other respects. 
There is not a sufficient sense of the irre- 
coverable nature of sin. Faust endeavors 
without repentance or confession to work 
his way back to moral standing and self- 
respect. This forms what is generally 
recognized as an impossible problem. 1 One's 
inherent sense of justice and righteousness 
abhors such a solution. The ending of the 
second section shows that it did not satisfy 
the soul of Goethe. 2 

This, then, was the problem cast upon 
Faust: How can one who has lost the sense 
of a personal God in the universe come to 
that knowledge which will satisfy? How 
can one who is troubled with the "uncom- 
fortable gleam of heavenly light," but who 
has no consciousness of Personal guidance, 
reach the heights of moral achievement? 
The question is whether one who hopes 
to be satisfied with things can successfully 
survive the disenchantments which lie in 



1 Royce, The Second Death, Atlantic Monthly, February, 
1913, p. 242. 

2 Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets, p. 155. 



156 CHRIST AND THE 

all lesser satisfactions the moment they are 
seized. The still deeper question is this: 
Can one who has set out deliberately to sin 
against light renew himself unto repentance, 
though he seek it carefully and with tears? 
The unpardonable sin was a lively theme 
in mediaeval days, and the mediaeval answer 
was that renewal was impossible. Did 
Goethe succeed in answering the old denial, 
and did he point the way to peace? 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 157 



CHAPTER XIII 
REDEMPTION BY CONFESSION 

The Irremediable Nature of Sin 

The first part of Faust deals with the 
simple half of the problem — Faust's skepti- 
cism and sin, and the redemption of Mar- 
garet by confession and renunciation. Here 
Goethe has drawn with master hand the 
irremediable nature of sin. The path of 
evil once entered upon, the whole universe 
seems in league to enlarge and perpetuate 
it. This is the case even though one be 
unconscious of the real motives that with- 
draw him from the path of right. Margaret 
did not know the real character of her lover. 
She did not know the nature of the sleeping 
potion which she gave her mother. Yet 
the consequences of her sin were no less 
terrible upon those she loved. Her re- 
sponsibility might be limited to her knowl- 
edge, but the results of her evil deed were 
bound by no such limitation. Her slight 



158 CHRIST AND THE 

variance from the way of absolute rectitude 
led in train the terrible consequences which 
in her innocence she could not foresee. 
Her sin began in personal vanity, and 
flowed from the guilelessness of her nature. 
But it brought consequences which were 
beyond her control the moment the evil 
thought had passed into act. Under the 
influence of remorse her sin has passed out 
of the realm of the unintentional to the 
darker deed. ^ 

The fact that one cannot retrieve the 
consequences of sin is one of the darkest 
problems thrust upon us. How could con- 
sequences so out of keeping with the pur- 
poseless human weakness that set them in 
motion come to pass in a moral world? 
Margaret finds that in her sin she has 
opened a Pandora's box that lets loose upon 
her all the Furies, and even Hope seems 
to have escaped with the rest. 

The Traditional Moral Supports of 
Margaret 

The source of Margaret's weakness is 
not like Faust's, intellectual. Her weakness 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 159 

lies in the purely formal and external nature 
of her religion. Her questioning of Faust's 
religion follows exactly this line. She does 
not question his moral character, but his 
acceptance of the beliefs and institutions 
of the church. So she is easily deceived 
by his meaningless jargon into accepting 
his moral standing because what he says 
sounds like the talk of the good priest. 
Such a religion has not the strength which 
will enable it to withstand the fiercest 
assaults of temptation, nor to arise again to 
recovery after having fallen, because it 
has no root in itself. The wonder is often 
expressed at the moral lapse of those who 
have been notably faithful to the forms of 
the church. The truth in every such case 
is that the religious life has been purely 
formal and external. It has not, therefore, 
resulted in the development of character 
necessary to withstand the assaults of 
temptation. Faithfulness to external re- 
ligion is always sure to be accepted as 
superior until its emptiness is thus displayed 
in the actual circumstances of life. It is a 
question that should give pause to every 



160 CHRIST AND THE 

religious leader, as to how far the formal 
religious exercises which are a part of his 
work may go in building up the character 
of those who attend. He must ask him- 
self how far such exercises are merely per- 
functory, pleasing to the religious imagina- 
tion, but of no practical religious signifi- 
cance. This danger is ever present when 
fine sentiments are indulged for their own 
sake, and do not get tied up to the actual 
mastery of flesh and spirit, the overcoming 
of selfishness of act and thought, and the 
service of one's fellow men. Alas, how few 
the religious institutions that could alto- 
gether abide this test! Yet it is the one 
that modern Christianity is, even now, 
called upon to make. 

The Ineffectiveness of Remorse Alone 

In such a case as that of Margaret — 
religion being merely formal and external — 
it is interesting to note the forces that bring 
to her a sense of her sin. She does not be- 
come conscious of her sin through the un- 
assisted processes of her own spirit, but 
through the attitude of the external world. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 161 

She is first made aware of the real nature 
of her sin by the discovery of the future 
attitude of the world toward her. This 
is brought home by the coarse suggestions 
of the gossip of Lisbeth at the fountain, 
regarding a neighbor who has gone wrong. 
In this she discovers the conventional at- 
titude of society. The attitude of relatives 
is next disclosed to her in the brutal up- 
braidings of her brother, Valentine, dying 
by the hand of Faust. The climax of her 
woe is not reached, however, until she dis- 
covers what will be the attitude of the 
church. In the cathedral, under the awful 
spell of the Gregorian chanting of the 
"Dies irae," all hope flees from her heart, 
and she falls in a swoon. 

So far we have only remorse, and remorse 
is about the best that a formal religion 
can produce in the sinner. Yet to lead 
only as far as remorse, and not to point to 
the way out, is to fail miserably. Balzac 
says: "Remorse is a weakness; it begins 
the fault anew. Repentance only is a 
force; it ends all." Remorse may be so 
keen as to result in the paralysis of the moral 



\m CHRIST AND THE 

powers. It may destroy the possibilities 
for better living, and keep one back from 
making the most of such fragments of life 
as may remain. God does not call us to 
return ever to dead battlefields to fight 
the phantom hosts of yesterday. There is 
strength only in going ahead bravely with 
what remains. Seen from this standpoint, 
there is nothing more blasting to moral 
progress than to brood over the mistakes 
of yesterday. It is not a religious act to 
keep them ever before the mind. Having 
cast off the works of darkness, we are 
under the moral obligation to forget as 
much of them as is possible. 

The Necessity for Retribution 

The retribution that falls upon Margaret 
excites our extreme pity. Yet we know 
how true it is to life. By retribution refer- 
ence is not had altogether to the external 
punishment of her crime, but more to the 
internal, for the external retributions of 
sin are often escaped, and are not to be com- 
pared with those that are internal and can- 
not be escaped. Every sin is in a sense 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 1G3 

irrecoverable. Every sin wounds and hurts 
other lives. Having once passed out into 
action, it can never be recalled. No true 
man is satisfied to have his sin go on damn- 
ing the world, ruining other lives, and pay, 
himself, no price of atonement. He needs 
suffering to save his own moral self-respect. 
So the guilty criminal creeps back to take 
his sentence because he realizes it is the 
only way to manhood. That is a poor 
sort of faith which hopes by some mental 
turn of the hand, or some magic formula, 
to enjoy sin and escape only its penalty. 
We are giving this question deeper consid- 
eration now than we have before in many 
years. Our minds had been dulled to the 
irrevocable nature and awfulness of sin by 
a wooden theology of barter and trade. 
The grotesqueness of the mediaeval thought 
of hell has often raised the sense of humor, 
while at the same time it has closed the eyes 
to the abiding and blasting qualities of sin, 
from which no sinner can escape. When 
we have sinned we have done an eternal 
injury to our own souls. And though 
through divine grace we rise above the fault 



164 CHRIST AND THE 

to better living, there will ever be some- 
thing missing from the soul's eternal satis- 
factions. 

We are sorely needing in our own day a 
revival of the sense of the nature of sin. 
Not that our judgments on conventional 
sins are not deep enough. Sometimes they 
are, sometimes they are not. Very often 
we pass by the really serious offenders and 
put upon the less offenders an added 
punishment. Sometimes the man who is 
most sinful in the sight of God retains, 
like Faust, his position in society, while the 
less guilty victim of his sin is compelled 
to pay to the last drop of blood. The con- 
sciousness of the inability of society to deal 
with the deepest sinner is coming over men 
with a new force, and is a potent source of 
despair. 

The practical effect upon society has been 
the breaking down of respect for the in- 
stitutional handling of the sinner. What- 
ever sinner can attract popular favor by 
arousing sentiments of pity can secure a 
pardon, and set at naught the judgment of 
the court. Men are thinking more deeply 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 1G5 

than they have been able to build their 
institutions. They will not longer be satis- 
fied with the raising of legal quibbles to 
save the wrongdoer. And this is because 
there is -coming over the world a new sense 
of the blighting character of sin, and the 
necessity for retribution. By and by we 
will not be satisfied to receive an eternal 
pardon which has not called out upon our 
part the full and complete giving of our- 
selves to a new life of righteousness. In 
God's thought no such easy way of salva- 
tion has been possible at any time, and such 
conceptions could never have satisfied any 
mind that thought deeply or was filled with 
a sense of the real character of sin. 

Goethe is morally and historically in 
agreement with the truth when he leaves 
Margaret to the punishment of the law. 
The way of retribution was now the only 
way to peace. It was paying what price 
might be paid as her atonement to society. 

The Great Renunciation 

The release of Margaret from the despair 
of sin is truly and wonderfully told in the 



166 CHRIST AND THE 

closing lines of the first part. Faust ar- 
rives at the prison to enable her to escape 
the approaching execution. The deeps of 
Margaret's heart are broken up. The voice 
of her lover calls her back from the insanity 
into which remorse and social misunder- 
standing have plunged her. All the at- 
traction of love, of liberty, of life, call upon 
her to escape with him . But escape to what ? 
Escape to be despised by the meanest, and 
most of all by herself. Their mutual sin 
has forever shut them out from their pos- 
sible Eden. She may escape the hand of 
society, but she cannot escape the hell- 
hounds of fear. No, the only course for 
her (and for him, if he knew it) is to face her 
crime, and to expiate it. She will no longer 
companion with evil. She no longer de- 
sires to pass under false pretenses. She 
desires to know if he realizes the depth of 
her wickedness? She insists on his hearing 
the dark story of her sin. But to escape! 
That would mean to perpetuate her sin, 
not to end it. That would mean to go back 
on the way of repentance and undo every 
step thus far taken toward the goal. She 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 167 

makes the great renunciation — she re- 
nounces the devil and all his works. A 
voice from above is heard crying, "She is 
saved." Margaret had attained at last 
to character. Out of the bitter ruins of 
life had been reared a refuge of the soul, 
founded in Eternal Righteousness. What 
the formal institutions of religion and society 
had not given her she had now attained for 
herself. 

Margaret's way to peace is hard. Its 
gate is narrow, and, alas, how few that find 
it! In how many respects do we prefer 
to live over the ashes of old volcanic fires 
than to move out upon the plains of open 
confession and peace! We allow so many 
wrongs to go unrighted, so many misunder- 
standings to remain uncorrected, that much 
of the sweetness and light that might fill 
life is replaced by bitter memories and bit- 
ter thoughts. How slow is man to come to 
the knowledge of the truth that no wrong 
which he does to his finer sense of righteous- 
ness and justice goes unpunished, but takes 
its deadly toll out of life and character! 
How fatal is any trifling of the human 



168 CHRIST AND THE 

soul with wrong, any receiving of the 
rewards of injustice or of fraud! Our 
close-shut universe will let no soul escape 
from its sin, however secret, but will, if it 
be not disavowed, write it with indelible 
lines into character. How foolish for men 
who have no desire for character to think 
they can cheat or defraud the heart of the 
universe and the great God, hugging to 
themselves pet sins and follies, rejoicing 
in the deception of their fellows — proud 
in the superficial standing of society ! With 
what glee do they hail the proposition that 
there is no hell, and take comfort in sin 
at the thought that the crude, mediaeval 
conception is gone. No hell? God needs 
only to turn upon them the white light of 
unescapable conscience, and themselves are 
hell — a hell that cannot be escaped without 
a change in all that they have thought or 
known or loved. If hell be an internal 
thing, then, indeed, a Saviour that saves us 
from the love and the following of sin is the 
only Saviour adequate. 

Over the horizon of the new day will arise 
a new sense of the awfulness of sin. And 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 169 

there are many who have lived but lightly, 
and who have thought but superficially 
hitherto, who will see this truth which moral 
beings cannot escape. 

We are saved not in our sins ; we are saved 
by ending our sin; we are saved from our 
sins. There must be for us what there was 
for Margaret — the great renunciation. 



170 CHRIST AND THE 



CHAPTER XIV 

REDEMPTION BY STRIVING 

Difference Between Faust's and Mar- 
garet's Problem 

When Faust withdraws himself before 
the high spiritual courage of Margaret, 
displayed now for the first time, his problem 
is consciously beginning where hers ends 
forever. With her final renunciation of 
every reward of sin, and her determination 
to expiate to the full her crime against 
society, Margaret rises to a height of moral 
grandeur which is painfully lacking in 
Faust. We cannot but feel this: if Faust 
had only been a man! If it had been only 
the weak and hesitating manhood of an 
Arthur Dimmesdale which constrained the 
latter to take his public stand beside Hester 
of the Scarlet Letter, much might have 
been forgiven him. But we see no such 
wholesome evidences of manhood in him. 
That is why the character of Faust is so 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 171 

unpopular in the common mind. We see 
at no time any evidences of repentance 
in that long career. Faust receives all — 
the satisfying of every appetite, the love 
of a good woman, social position and power, 
the gratifying of his aesthetic tendencies, 
of his thirst for scientific attainment, and 
his passion for philanthropy. There is no 
form of this world's satisfactions which 
does not come knocking at his door. One 
grows impatient with the shallowness 
of heart that can receive all these things, 
and have no regret for the lives which his 
selfish happiness has blasted. There is 
lacking in Faust that spirit of repentance 
which is essential to moral depth. In this 
is reflected clearly the personal feeling of 
Goethe himself. "Repentance seemed to 
him something entirely negative and un- 
productive, a gratuitous and useless self- 
humiliation. Not through contrition and 
self-chastisement, but through discipline 
and self-reliance, he thought, is the way to 
perfection." 1 

1 Conversations "(of Goethe) with Eckermann, translated 
by Kuno Francke, in German Ideals of To-Day, p. 60. 



172 CHRIST AND THE 

Yet despite Goethe's own word we cannot 
feel that he continued absolutely true to his 
personal feeling. We have already seen that 
in the end he contradicts all his theories 
in the mystic chorus, and the salvation of 
Faust, because he finds himself driven to 
it by the requirements of dramatic effect. 
And what is that but saying that it was 
necessary to answer to the common con- 
science of men? 

The Sin Against Light 

There seems a deeper note of explanation 
of Faust's indifference toward repentance 
than even Goethe's own sentiment. The 
original legend was the tale of a man who by 
league with Satan had put himself deliber- 
ately beyond the pale of repentance. Had 
Goethe made the scene of Margaret's 
spiritual triumph the point of Faust's sal- 
vation, he would have been untrue to the 
Faust of popular thought. Faust was sup- 
posed to have committed the unpardon- 
able sin, for which there was no repentance. 
The story was created to impress the 
mediaeval mind with the horrible end of 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 173 

apostasy. It was only one of many similar 
popular legends. 

There was also an added reason why the 
same way of repentance that stood wide to 
Margaret was not open to Faust. It lay 
in the comparative natures of their sins. 
Margaret's was a sin of impulse, committed 
against what was her usually dominant 
better nature. It had come upon her 
unawares, and she had yielded without 
realizing what its sinfulness and its con- 
sequences might be. The sin of Faust was 
deliberately planned. Its consequences 
were foreseen. There was no concern for 
the effect upon others. Faust was exactly 
what he appears to be — a thoroughly hard- 
ened man of the world. Only in Marga- 
ret's case the fire burned a little deeper into 
his soul than he had expected. The unde- 
served love of Margaret utterly destroyed 
his old world of enjoyment and made the 
obscenities of the Walpurgis night abhor- 
rent even to his all but godless soul. Mar- 
garet's sin had been more against herself 
than others. With her willingness to pub- 
lish it abroad, to put it from her and to 



174 CHRIST AND THE 

expiate it, came release and peace. But 
no such sudden way was open to Faust. 
If he were ever saved, even at the last, 
he must enter in by greatest pain and diffi- 
culty. That this was true lay in himself and 
in the nature of his sin. What was known 
as the unpardonable sin depended not on 
some chance impulse of sudden choice. 
It was the deliberate forsaking of the way 
of righteousness against light, for tempo- 
rary rewards that sin would give. It was 
sin with perfect understanding of its re- 
sults, with definite and final abjuration of 
what was good and holy. This was the 
nature of Faust 's sin, and there was no way 
of repentance because his heart was hard- 
ened against repentance. 1 It was steeled 
against any testimony of conscience. If 
it had not been for the shock of the Mar- 
garet episode, if it had not been that the 
purity, faith, and beauty of her spirit re- 
proached him, in the midst of all the devil's 
satisfactions of life, he never could have 
found the way to redemption. This was 

1 Read Royce, Atlantic Monthly, February, 1913, "The 
Second Death." 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 175 

the point in which Satan overreached him- 
self and unwittingly planted the seeds of 
Faust's salvation. It was the woman-soul 
that led Faust upward and on. 

"For Faust, the man, there is still one 
way of attainment, and that is given in the 
sentence of Jean Paul Richter, 'The only 
repentance open to thee is a better deed.' "* 

Living in the Good and Beautiful 
Selfishly 

"Spinoza defines good as that which we 
know with certainty to be useful to us, and 
evil as that of which we know with like 
certainty that it will hinder us from the 
attainment of any good." 2 Faust's fail- 
ure, and Goethe's failure as well, sprang 
from this inadequate basis for a life philoso- 
phy. The weakness of such a philosophy 
lies in its selfishness. To live in the good, 
the true, and the beautiful is very well 
unless it means to separate us from the 
sinning, erring, and needy world. It is 
a comfortable business, this saving of one's 



1 Coupland, Spirit of Faust, p. 175. 

2 Walsh, Faust, The Legend and the Poem, p. 81. 



176 CHRIST AND THE 

own soul regardless of others. It enables 
us to be indifferent to social iniquities, it 
saves the necessity for nervous excitement 
in the face of great public moral crises, but, 
unfortunately, its salvation is only a spe- 
cious one. Its comfort is only a self-decep- 
tion. There are some things of far greater 
moral worth than peace. There are times 
when peace, far from being a virtue, is a 
sin. No man has a right to peace except 
through the gateway of righteousness. No 
man has a right to peace so long as there 
remains a social horror that he can help 
to right. Until the kingdom of God shall 
come in power the man of God must daily 
gird on his sword. The only peace he has a 
right to is the peace of the bivouac and the 
camp. It is peace in the midst of war. 
A religious peace which is less than that will 
be found a delusion and a snare. Because 
there has been so much of this empty peace 
talked of, and practiced, and praised as 
religion, we are in danger of forgetting 
quite what religion means. This is the 
point of resistance for most of the "isms" 
and "osophies" that unnerve present-day 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 177 

religious endeavor. We are striving to 
have peace in ourselves when we ought to 
forget peace for self in a strife to save 
society from corruption. Thinking mental 
health in a world of sin utterly overlooks 
the fact that the individual is not isolated, 
but lives in a world of relations. These 
relations are as much a part of his mental 
and moral make-up as his subjective feeling. 
In fact, what man is subjectively is to be 
learned by his reactions upon society, and 
not from states of bliss, nor from his own 
testimony. Man has a greater task than 
thinking mental health in a world of sin. 
He cannot even think mental health unless 
he is doing something to rescue that world 
from its sin. In this Goethe has been true 
to the experience of life. Though Faust 
has all the world at his feet for purposes 
of self-cultivation, there remains within 
his heart an ache which never can be cured 
by any selfish satisfaction. No height of 
wisdom, power, or knowledge, nor even 
wide extended philanthropy, can make fair 
to him the passing moment until he comes 
to the point of forgetting himself, his mental 



178 CHRIST AND THE 

health, and his personal satisfaction, in 
a real self-sacrifice. In the present day 
there are no more useless lives to be found 
anywhere than those which retire within 
themselves to enjoy the bliss of a subjective 
experience or than those that for the sake 
of mental health shut out from their vision 
the tormented and suffering world. Such 
lives have of all the least right to the term 
religious. As in Christ's day, the publicans 
and sinners enter in before them. Of a 
truth "He that seeketh to save his life 
shall lose it." 

The Wilderness of Strife 

Was it impossible for one who had started 
out to find his satisfactions in the world of 
time and sense to arrive at the goal by any 
other way than the wilderness of striving 
(streben) ? Probably not to anyone so com- 
pletely given over to the folly of doubt 
as was Faust. Back of all his skepticism 
of any good in the world, of any satisfaction, 
lay the deeper skepticism which was willing 
to sell his soul, if in any of these things he 
could be satisfied. So we see him run the 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 179 

whole gamut of what the world can give, 
and at every point he is turned back on self 
wearied and disappointed. The wilderness 
would have been unnecessary if there had 
been less willingness to be led by the devil. 
If he had not given himself into the slavery 
of his lower impulses, he might not only 
have been saved for a future life, but he 
might have been saved for the life that now 
is. The means and the methods that he 
used in statecraft, culture, and philan- 
thropy were dictated by this lower self, 
that is, the devil. The successes he gained 
were thus robbed of that moral significance 
which alone could have made them of worth 
and satisfaction to a moral being. Striv- 
ing, to produce satisfactory results, must 
have not a selfish but an unselfish and moral 
end. Because this was lacking the very 
attainment brought disillusionment. This 
fact lends itself to the pessimism of the pres- 
ent which is so common among those that 
have attained distinction in the world. The 
search for wealth, for fame, or honor, has 
been undertaken at the behest of the lower 
impulses. It has been a purely selfish 



180 CHRIST AND THE 

search. The moment of attainment has 
also been the moment of disillusionment, 
because the highest joy that is given in 
this world is the joy which comes of un- 
selfishness. He who hopes to tread any 
path of selfishness to power and satisfaction 
wanders in a " wilderness and a solitary 
way," far from the springs of joy. To 
have one's enemy in one's hand! — yes, 
for a moment it gives a fleeting satisfaction, 
but there is always our soul to reckon with. 
Before we have even formulated that joy 
to ourselves it is crying out, "Unworthy! 
Unworthy!" 

"The Hunter is Home from the Hill" 

Up to the very close Mephistopheles has 
tried to satisfy Faust with things, and Faust, 
driven from one to another, has hoped for 
satisfaction thus. But the truth at last 
breaks upon him that peace can come only 
in unselfish service. He finds that satis- 
faction for man cannot come in achievement 
of ends but in struggle for highest ends. 
In his determination to drain the marsh 
and make the home for a free people he 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 181 

does not hope to endow them with institu- 
tions of freedom that will last forever. 
Freedom must be fought for by every 
generation. Man's satisfaction is in fight- 
ing out his own problem. He finds his own 
way to peace. The task upon which hu- 
manity is set is too great to be compassed by 
any one century or age, but in the ceaseless 
struggle to be free, to be just, to be right, 
man finds his satisfaction and his peace. 

In marching onwards, bliss and torment find, 
Though, every moment, with unsated mind. 

It is the truth which Tennyson set forth 
so vividly in "Wages": 

Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song, 
Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an 

endless sea — 
Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the 

wrong — 

Give her the glory of going on, and still to be. 

She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats 

of the just, 
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer 

sky: 
Give her the wages of going on, and not to die. 



182 CHRIST AND THE 

The skepticism and world-weariness of 
the young Faust is thus answered. The 
perfect knowledge, the perfect achievement, 
the perfect solution is not for him. Knowl- 
edge, nature, industry, government, cul- 
ture — in none of these can he hope to speak 
or to know the final word. All such hoped- 
for resting places are merely as dreams of 
the night. 

To know that life, flying amid the strug- 
gle, is giving itself to help on the better 
day — this is to be his satisfaction and his 
salvation. 

This perhaps was the deepest truth that 
Goethe uttered for our modern age. It 
is a truth of which we are being daily made 
more conscious. We are no longer in love 
with closed systems. The old demand 
for absolute and finished truth is now being 
put in the background. Experience, 
through history, has shown too many 
systems, supposed quite generally to be 
the final word and forced on reluctant minds 
with fire and sword, finally falling of their 
own weight because they had not the power 
of truth. That the truth of to-day will 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 183 

be adequate for the growing life and moral 
outlook of to-morrow is the most impossible 
of dreams, for life can only be held of life. 
We cannot constrain the future with our 
theological opinion nor even with our in- 
terpretation of the Christ. Because he is 
living he can never lose his hold upon the 
centuries. It is the task, the duty, and the 
privilege of to-morrow to interpret him in 
its own way. To have helped to realize 
him in the world, to have helped in the reign 
of his eternal kingdom — that should be 
enough for any man, without attempting 
to stretch his human understandings to the 
point of infallibility for all time. "Man 
finds his end only in the active conquest 
of freedom, a task which from its very nature 
cannot be completed in time." 1 

1 Davidson, Philosophy of Faust, p. 143. 



184 CHRIST AND THE 



CHAPTER XV 

DID GOETHE SOLVE THE PROBLEM? 

The Attempt to Avoid a Dualistic 
World 

Did Goethe solve the problem upon 
which he set himself? Did Faust find sal- 
vation along the lines that Goethe intended, 
or was that salvation, in the last analysis, 
a contradiction of all that had gone before? 
I believe that, considered from the stand- 
point of his own philosophy, we must admit 
he has failed. The contradictory redemp- 
tion which he has assumed for Faust does 
not satisfy the modern mind. 

In the first place, Goethe set out to avoid 
the prevalent dualism which violently 
divided the universe in halves — the good 
and the evil, Creator against creation — and 
which was the fundamental basis of medi- 
evalism. He ended by appealing for 
Faust's salvation to that very theology 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 185 

which in the beginning he repudiated. 1 
In the last act of the drama that world of 
mediaeval thought which has been so labo- 
riously destroyed is invoked with its magic 
to save a Faust who has not yet, as the 
modern conscience sees it, done the things 
meet for repentance and salvation. In the 
beginning Mephistopheles is the subjective 
spirit of denial to be found in Faust. In 
the world he is the darkness which makes 
us conscious of the light, but a part of the 
universe, existing with divine sanction and 
permission. In the end he is a mediaeval 
devil, and no part of Faust, and no necessary 
part of the universe. The dualistic world 
is set up again and Faust is saved from the 
wreck as by fire. Goethe set out with an 
idea of the unity of creation — that evil is 
only the shadow of good, bringing good in 
spite of itself, that God is everywhere in 
this creation, working here and there, a 
Force, an Act, a Deed, but never a think- 
ing Personality. The only goal of such a 
philosophical progress is pantheism. But 

1 For discussion of this point see Davidson, Philosophy of 
Faust, chapter on "The Redemption of Faust." 



186 CHRIST AND THE 

Goethe had been driven by the very logic 
of events to give up this position. Along 
the horizon of life there may be sufficient 
promise of salvation in all that Faust sets 
out to achieve, but when the night ap- 
proaches and the half-gathered harvest of 
his good and evil is around him, it is dis- 
covered to be so much of it tares instead 
of grain that his heart is left unsatisfied. 
This is the end of every moralist. There 
is one thing more tragic even than the sad 
hour when the scholar in world-weariness 
turns from the stultified forms of his study 
to seek the highest' in existence. That is 
when at the last, rich beyond the reach of 
Want, Debt, or Necessity, he cannot bar out 
Care, ugliest of all, and Death, most menac- 
ing of all. All the triumphs of his life — 
love, statesmanship, culture, war, and com- 
merce — have turned to dust and ashes, and 
the last act of his life is only measurably 
better than that which has gone before. 
In that last moment he arrives at the ap- 
prehension of the truth — that the reason 
all he has done has given him no satisfaction 
is because it has all been selfishly done. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 187 

For the first time in his self-centered ex- 
istence he contemplates a work that will 
make others happy. In its contemplation 
he bids the passing moment stay — and 
expires. But there is here only the be- 
ginning, not the end of salvation. Another 
world is required to work it out. 

This discloses the fatal dualism of 
Goethe's thought. He fell into the very 
error from which it was his purpose to 
escape. He had not grasped the thought 
of the eternity of this present world, or, 
we might better say, the eternal character 
of present action. If there is a God present 
anywhere in the universe, he must be a 
spiritual God with whom man can com- 
mune and cooperate only through his own 
spiritual nature. From this God of spirit 
nature too must find her reason and her 
interpretation. She cannot be something 
of herself and apart from her Creator. She 
possesses no meaning apart from his spirit- 
ual ends. She is understood of man only 
because of man's spiritual nature, which is 
in kinship with God's. Starting out to 
overcome that hopeless dualism between 



188 CHRIST AND THE 

good and evil which sunders the world of 
God from the world of the devil, which puts 
an endless conflict in the heart of nature 
where God can never be eventually trium- 
phant, Goethe, by the inadequateness of 
pantheistic philosophy, falls back into the 
fatal error from which he strove to emerge. 

Too Short to Span the Distance from 
Hell to Heaven 

If the weakness of this attempt to solve 
the mystery of life were philosophical alone, 
the offense would not be so serious. But 
the greatest failure lies in the practical 
bearing on life. Though Goethe did not 
so intend it, the practical import of the 
drama is the darkest pessimism. This 
springs from the unsocial character of 
Goethe's idea, which is itself more or less 
the product of an unsocial age. The whole 
thought of Goethe and of Faust respecting 
a philosophy of life was the culture of the 
individual regardless of what surroundings 
might be. Tennyson has aptly summed 
up the dangers from intellectual pride in his 
reference to Goethe in "The Palace of Art": 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 189 

"O godlike isolation which art mine, 
I can but count thee perfect gain, 
What time I watch the darkening droves of swine 
That range on yonder plain. 

"In filthy sloughs they roll a prurient skin, 
They graze and wallow, breed and sleep; 
And oft some brainless devil enters in, 
And drives them to the deep. 

"I take possession of man's mind and deed. 
I care not what the sects may brawl. 
I sit as God holding no form of creed, 
And contemplating all." 

But for this essentially selfish attitude 
of the soul there come painful misgivings 
in this world of pressing human relations: 

Full oft the riddle of the painful earth 

Flash'd thro' her as she sat alone, 
Yet not the less held she her solemn mirth, 

And intellectual throne. 

When she would think, where'er she turned her 
sight 

The airy hand confusion wrought, 
Wrote, "Mene, mene," and divided quite 

The kingdom of her thought. 

In the dark places of her palace stood 
Uncertain shapes; . . . 



190 CHRIST AND THE 

There lay behind Faust certain unpurged 
sins which no amount of action could of 
itself have purged. What he needed was 
not a Pater Seraphicus to purge his sins. 
He needed to do some spiritual house-clean- 
ing himself. He needed a new heart, a 
new conscience, 1 a new and living sense of 
social responsibility — in other words, he 
needed a real consciousness of the dark and 
blasting sins that lay behind him and such 
a forsaking of the devil and his works 
in this life that he would have been a new 
creature. There is no heavenly dram or 
potion that could save the Faust who be- 
trayed Margaret. The Faust who is borne 
aloft must be a new Faust who has de- 
liberately set behind him, in all humility, 
every way of sin. 

Goethe has characterized his work as 
"a journey from heaven to hell and back 
again to heaven," but the means he takes 
to span the backward gulf are not sufficient. 
His difficulty is one that is sure to attend 
a purely personal ideal of salvation. The 

1 Royce, "The Second Death," Atlantic Monthly, February, 
1913, p. 242. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 191 

salvation of Faust was not the most im- 
portant thing in the world. From God's 
standpoint there were also Margaret and 
her mother and Valentine. Faust's salva- 
tion must lie in the large in taking God's 
standpoint. No human being is justified 
in taking the position that his individual 
salvation is the all-important matter in the 
divine order. A true perspective on this 
fact of life would make us less flippant and 
more reverential in our treatment of God, 
less selfish in our prayers, and more con- 
cerned over our neighbor's welfare. I ought 
to be honest enough with myself to realize 
that God is more anxious over the salvation 
of my neighborhood, with its some thou- 
sands of souls, by some thousands of times, 
than he is over my individual salvation. 
If, then, in my intense anxiety, not for 
godlike character, but to escape a future 
prepared for the devil and his angels, I 
shut my eyes to God's intenser desire, where 
do I find that common standpoint with 
God which would justify my salvation? 
Faust was more concerned with a personal 
salvation than he was with a character. 



192 CHRIST AND THE 

The only thing eternal in us is a godlike 
character. That is the only thing we need 
to struggle and strive for. If we do not 
get at least the rudiments of that in our 
earthly experience, it is futile for us to 
expect it to come to us somewhere else. It 
is a vain and empty satisfaction to imagine 
the battle fought and won on ethereal 
battlefields when it has not even been 
sensed here. He who deliberately flings 
away the culture of character for a salva- 
tion afforded by the magic of mental assent 
to doctrine, or the power of the church, or 
the absolution of a priest, has not yet 
learned what religion is. He has sold his 
birthright for a mess of pottage. What 
Faust needed was not philanthropy, but 
character. 

The "Streben" Philosophy of Modern 
Life 

The bearing of Goethe's philosophy of 
"salvation by striving" upon modern life 
becomes quickly evident. Goethe stood at 
the opening of the industrial age, and therein 
lay for him a great hope. To a large degree 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 193 

our age has made his philosophy its own. 
"Faust is the gospel of human salvation 
through human activity." 1 Surely, the 
philanthropic Faust, dying with a load of 
sins on his head, but blessed in the thought 
of topping off life with one deed devoid 
of selfish greed, and winning thereby im- 
mortality, lies very close to a common 
modern conception. Our modern industrial 
system, like a veritable Mephistopheles, 
has driven us into some very questionable 
ethics. We certainly need, if we can, to 
purge ourselves of sin. In our great steel 
plants men work under conditions that 
shorten life and render them little less than 
brutish. In the depths of the earth men 
toil for us, never looking at the sun, with 
never a thought from us of mercy or com- 
miseration. Amid the awful ravages of 
the white plague overwearied fingers sew 
our "cheap clothes and nasty," of which 
Mr. Kingsley spoke so feelingly so long, 
so long ago. In the stores we, searching 
for the cheapest, are served by hands that 

1 Herman Grimm, quoted by W. L. Gage, Salvation of 
Faust. 



194 CHRIST AND THE 

once were pure, and would be now only that 
soul and body must be kept together, and 
the hard-hearted employer is not willing 
to pay wages sufficient without the assist- 
ance that impurity gives. The hands of 
lisping children of the tenements assist the 
gratification of our demand for luxuries, 
meantime laying the foundation for future 
ill health and crime and ignorance. We 
can "help lift their condition" with parks, 
schools, playgrounds, the gift of libraries, 
and foundations, but after we have done 
all this, who will save our souls? So long 
as we consent to profit by these evils where 
is our boasted character, and what can God 
do for us? The weakness of human sal- 
vation by human activity is that too often 
the heart of things is left out. Your atten- 
tion is called to the fact that while Faust 
takes pleasure in the good his industrial 
establishment does by providing for so 
many mouths, he himself lives in a palace 
and is the dictator of it all. The rest are 
like slaves with no power of self-govern- 
ment. His philanthropy lacked the heart 
of religion because it lacked real sacrifice. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 195 

He gave out of undiminished comfort as 
if it were his own and not God's treasure. 
He did not move out of the palace to take 
his place alongside of other men in the 
struggle. Therefore his philanthropy was 
devoid of religion and could not save his 
soul. His bridge reached from a simpler 
to a more complex and somewhat mitigated 
hell, but it was devoid of that element 
which alone could have redeemed Faust's 
world and Faust himself, and the age in 
which we live. 

The Unappreciated Cross 

"The highest moment attained by man 
is the hour of intensest pain, and a crown 
of thorns is the meed for the divinest 
brow." 1 This is the fundamental truth 
which Goethe failed to grasp and which 
alone would have been sufficient to bridge 
the gap from hell to heaven. Davidson 
has called attention to the sad want of 
moral appreciation in sending Faust out 
from the prison scene with Margaret to the 



Coupland, Spirit of Faust, p. 172. 



196 CHRIST AND THE 

refuge of a calm contemplation of nature — 
"to think that the pangs of remorse can 
be cured by a poultice of grass, moss, and 
starlight." 1 This was Goethe's failing, and 
it is too much ours. There is less peace to 
be had in this modern life by contemplation 
of nature and more peace of the sort that 
endureth ever by the taking up of a real 
cross of Christ. Unless the individual can 
rise to that universality which love gives 
in binding him to his fellow men, he has not 
learned the way to life. Faust could have 
been truly saved in character, and that 
means in reality, only as the interests of 
self had fallen before an all-giving sacrifice 
for others. How strange that his eyes were 
closed to the deepest fact of human life. 
It was a part of his youthful pessimism 
to note 

The few who therefore something really learned, 
Unwisely frank, with hearts that spurned con- 
cealing 
And to the mob laid bare each thought and 
feeling 
Have evermore been crucified and burned. 



1 Davidson, Philosophy of Faust, p. 73. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 197 

Why did not the older Faust discover the 
secret? He looked upon common men as 
"the mob," not from a heart of love. 

And some day the world will read the 
secret of Faust's mystery no longer darkly, 
but plainly, and some day humanity will 
discover what Faust never discovered — 
that the way to joy, to power, and to sal- 
vation is the way of the now unappreciated 
cross. 



THE FIFTH STEP 

BRAND— THE STRUGGLE ARISING FROM 
THE FAILURE OF SPIRITUAL IDEALS 



CHAPTER XVI 

"ALL OR NOTHING" 

Introduction 

the iron conscience 

In Ibsen's Brand we have, worked out 
to its practical conclusion, a problem which 
was much more the problem of a previous 
generation than of our own. Brand is the 
impersonation of the iron conscience. He 
had the highest scorn of all measures of 
compromise. He seeks absolute obedience 
to his conception of the will of God, but 
with an absence of the tempering quality 
of mercy. There still lingers, here and 
there, a conscience of this kind, though it 
is not, nor ever has been, a popular type. 
More pertinent to the shallow philosophy 
of self -culture which characterizes our own 
age is Ibsen's Peer Gynt, but its consider- 
ation would bear us beyond the limits of 

201 



202 CHRIST AND THE 

this volume. Bernard Shaw and others 
have been glad to discover in Brand a 
refutation and denial of the Christian faith, 
but such a view is singularly lacking in 
insight, and results from the blinding of the 
judgment by the personal wish. It is 
easy to find in any vital work just what 
one is looking for. Brand's religion is 
only partly Christian. It is just because 
of that fatal lack of the spirit which would 
make him truly Christian that he fails. 
This, we must believe, it was Ibsen's pur- 
pose to show. If anything is refuted, it 
is the Judaic form of religion which Paul 
and the other apostles had also declared 
partial and imperfect. One cannot of him- 
self fulfill, even by the fullest sacrifice, his 
complete and absolute obligation to God. 
In the end he must be saved by grace, and 
he must save others by his grace. This 
must be ever the story of any adequate 
salvation. 

The Story 

Young Brand, having finished his studies 
for the ministry, is endeavoring to discover 
the place and the substance of his mission. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 203 

He views with supercilious scorn the make- 
shift, easy-going character of the religious 
ideals which rule the men and women 
around him. He cries, 

"Be what you are with all your heart, 
And not by pieces and in part." 

He scorns the half-hearted spirit of his 
countrymen : 

"His faults, his merits, fragments all, 
Partial in good, partial in ill, 
Partial in great things and in small; 
But here's the grief — that, worst or best, 
Each fragment of him wrecks the rest." 1 

Importuned by a father to minister to his 
dying daughter, Brand sets out with father 
and son across the snowfields. The fogs 
roll in to obscure the way, and render the 
trip across the mountains exceedingly 
hazardous. Fearing the deadly avalanche, 
the father turns back and tries to dissuade 
him. Brand, disgusted, pushes on, leaving 
his companions behind, and arrives in time 
to minister to the dying girl. The sun 
soon lifts the fog, and he discovers Einar, 

1 Brand, translation by Herford, Act I, p. 23. 



204 CHRIST AND THE 

an aesthetic painter, and Agnes, his sweet- 
heart, sporting along the way from their 
betrothal feast. They feel that life in its 
deepest reality is only a thing of laughter, 
joy, and song, and are unmindful of the 
precipice along the edge of which they play. 
From this danger Brand saves them by a 
warning cry. Later he meets the mad 
girl, Gerd, in wild abandon endangering 
everybody as she throws stones at a falcon. 
She tells him to forsake the conventional 
ideals of religion for the ice-church in the 
mountains, where the cataracts sing the 
mass. In these three Brand finds disclosed 
the three types of weakness which it is his 
mission to fight. The father who turned 
back for fear of the avalanche is "faint- 
heart," Einar and Agnes, with their super- 
ficial views of life, represent the type which 
he calls "light-heart," while Gerd, with 
her wild ways fighting against all restriction 
of convention, is "wild-heart." 

Light-heart who, crown'd with leafage gay, 
Loves by the dizziest verge to play, 
Faint-heart, who marches slack and slow, 
Because old Wont will have it so; 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 205 

Wild-heart, who, borne on lawless wings, 
Sees fairness in the foulest things, 
War front and rear, war high and low, 
With this fell triple-banded foe! 
I see my Call! 1 

It is thus that Brand dedicates himself 
to the "all or nothing" principle of life. 
Henceforward farewell to all half-hearted 
measures and that religion which is intent 
only on self -salvation : 

A little pious in the pew, 

A little grave — his father's way — 
Over the cup a little gay — 

It was his father's fashion too ! 

He soon has opportunity to put his resolve 
into action. As he approaches his native 
village he finds the Mayor's clerk distribut- 
ing food to the starving in completely pro- 
fessional charity. Where one has died it 
is not without its happy side, because there is 
one less to feed. Should one come from out- 
side the parish, no human want would argue 
for his relief because "beyond our bounds." 

I do my duty with precision — 
But always in my own Division. 



Herford's Brand, Act I, p. 36. 



206 CHRIST AND THE 

Into the midst of this scene breaks a woman 
who appeals for some one to cross the 
fjord to her dying husband, who, in a fit 
of madness caused by the suffering of his 
starving children, has slain one of them. 
The only bridge was swept away as the 
woman crossed. Upon the fjord rages a 
tempest in which it seems no boat could 
live. No one will volunteer to go with 
Brand to hold the sail. All are held back 
from the heroic by consideration for their 
future, their families, or some convenient 
excuse. Agnes demands that her lover 
Einar go, to prove his manhood, but Einar 
is like the others, and by his refusal puts 
a great gulf between them. At last, as 
the boat is pushed off, Agnes leaps in. The 
heroism of Brand decides the people to call 
him for their priest. He is at first unwilling, 
having in view larger fields than would be 
afforded by the narrow valley of his native 
place. The clearer-sighted, because loving, 
Agnes persuades him that here is as great 
possibility as anywhere, and he remains. 

His mother, a woman of the world and 
a miser, forms the first great test of his new 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 207 

philosophy of life. Thoroughly sordid and 
low in life, she had hoped to save her soul 
by educating her son for the ministry. 
When he declares that she shall not be 
saved except by giving to the poor all her 
possessions, she finds it impossible to break 
the bondage of long years of sin, and dies 
unconfessed, crying out that God will be 
more lenient than her hard-hearted son. 

We next see Brand and Agnes married and 
living with their little boy in the sunless 
valley where their work demands their 
presence. The child sickens, and the only 
hope of saving his life is to remove him to a 
gentler climate. This Brand is in the act 
of doing when he is reminded by the people 
and by Gerd, who represents now his own 
conscience, that it is inconsistent with the 
theory he has been preaching, that God 
demands "all or nothing." 

He remains and the child dies. But the 
heaviest stroke is yet to come. The heart 
of Agnes is bound up in her child. She 
puts the Christmas candle in the window 
where it may shine across the grave. Ac- 
cording to Brand's principle, this shows a 



208 CHRIST AND THE 

heart rebellious against the divine prov- 
idence and he commands that the candle 
be removed. The last refuge of the wo- 
man's heart is the little garments of the 
dead boy. As soon as this new idolatry 
is discovered it must be quenched. Here 
occur some of the most moving lines of 
literature. Brand commands that the gar- 
ments be given the illegitimate son of a 
hag of the ditch in all her foulness and 
filth. A little cap concealed in the bosom 
of Agnes's dress is the last and absolute 
demand. As this is yielded there comes 
in her heart the peace of complete surrender, 
but, alas! also a breaking heart. She has 
been called upon for the sacrifice which 
passes the bounds of human strength. She 
dies warning Brand that one cannot look 
on the face of Jehovah and live. 

Brand has long since felt dissatisfied 
with his church. He has been led to feel 
that conducted on a grander scale it will 
be more satisfying. He builds a cathedral 
with the ill-gotten hoardings of his mother, 
but on the day of its dedication, he sees 
how it is all a lie and instead of unlocking 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 209 

it to the people he throws the keys in the 
river and exhorts the people to follow him 
far off, far up, to a new church uncon- 
ventional but perfect in the mountains. 
This the people, admiring his courage and 
sincerity, at first do, but soon there are the 
common difficulties, hunger, the means of 
life; these are questions which must be 
met. The schools of fish, returning, glisten 
in the fjord. They stone their leader and 
return to the normal and too common 
life. Brand fares alone far up the mountain 
to discover in the end that his ideal church 
was only an ice-church. Here too con- 
science is present in the form of Gerd, whose 
pistol shot brings down the avalanche that 
swallow T s him up, while a voice is heard 
above the ruck exclaiming, "I am the God 
of love." This legend indicates alike the 
source of Brand's failure and discloses the 
only hope of his salvation. Both stand- 
points are true and both are allowable. 

Brand's Character Analyzed 

We shall not understand Brand's charac- 
ter without taking into account the circum- 



210 CHRIST AND THE 

stances of his birth. In Brand's mother 
there is a will quite as full of iron as in the 
son. Only instead of going in the direction 
of self-surrender its whole thought is self- 
profit. In the mother's case it is the iron 
will bent on its own satisfaction, expecting 
in the end to bend God to its own uses. 
To this end love and every dear treasure 
of life are sacrificed. On the other hand, 
Brand represents the opposite condition. 
With him every love and every treasure of 
the passing hour is sacrificed to what is 
deemed to be the will of God, in the pursuit 
of a supposed perfection. In the midst 
of this Brand is pursued by a lawless im- 
agination in the form of Gerd, luring him 
now from all conventional forms, now be- 
coming a pursuing conscience to keep him 
from every compromise. Ibsen here read 
truly the human heart. It is not often the 
purest-minded priest that submits himself 
to the deepest flagellations. The very law- 
lessness of Brand's imagination became in 
moments that conscience returned to domi- 
nate, the deepest scourge of his soul. We 
do not know how often behind the deepest 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 411 

sacrifices of modern life there lie the shadows 
of deeper sins of which by a sort of flagella- 
tion the soul hopes to rid itself. Brand's 
birth, his early memories, his bringing up, 
all help to emphasize the completeness of 
his revolt from the dead-level plane of con- 
ventional religious ideals in an endeavor 
to save his own soul and to make amends 
for his mother's wickedness. In his con- 
ception of the bearing of heredity on life 
Ibsen is close kin with iEschylus and 
Euripides. 

This forms the tragic face of Brand's 
problem. How to win a holiness that shall 
undo the deeds of his mother; how out of 
all that foul start to win a perfection which 
God himself must recognize, which man 
must recognize also, and which must change 
the face of the earth — that was his problem. 

Just here we witness the necessity for the 
"all or nothing" principle of Brand. As 
he saw it, this complete giving of himself 
was necessary for one who from such foul- 
ness would win his way to heaven. The 
sense of his own unworthiness, the fear of 
participating in the self-seeking of a mother 



212 CHRIST AND THE 

who turned holiest things to self-grati- 
fication, made him what he was. He feared 
to save his boy, lest he lose his own soul. 
He feared to temporize with Agnes's grief, 
lest his own heart should give way to 
human weakness. His uncompromising at- 
titude with his mother ruthlessly crushed 
his lively affection, but he refused her the 
comfort of religion that by a full and com- 
plete sacrifice she might save her soul. 
Such a thoroughgoing individual as Brand 
is inconvenient to have about. He is ever 
bringing religion into contrast with tasks 
and duties that seem to be necessary to 
life. He presents ideals which, if observed 
to the letter, make life itself impossible. 
The sheriff found how uncomfortable it 
was for the existing order to have Brand 
about and so asked him to please move on 
to another neighborhood. 

Religious fanatics spring out of the soil 
of corruption that produced Brand, from 
the days of Loyola to those of John B. 
Gough. It is rare for religious intensity 
to spring from surroundings of culture and 
from normal habits of life and thought. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 213 

The life that has a keen sense of being 
digged from a pit is the life that is prepared 
to go upon a crusade for righteousness. 
Of this kind and temper the world is ever 
in need to waken it from its conscienceless 
lethargies and to set it upon the heroic. 

The Successive Tests of Brand's Motto 
of Life 

The first test of Brand's absolute-per- 
fection philosophy came through his mother, 
and here was registered his first failure. 
He felt v it necessary for her salvation that 
she should strip herself to nakedness and 
rags in order to kill the sin of covetousness. 
However true we may consider Brand's 
attitude in the matter, the fact remains 
that his mother died unchurched and 
unsaved. His "all or nothing" doctrine, 
necessary or unnecessary, was not sufficient 
to snatch her life from the impending ruin. 
Who shall say but that a little more of 
filial love, a little more of pitying consider- 
ation for the remnants of good, might have 
led her along the way and might have made 
possible for her the great renunciation? 



214 CHRIST AND THE 

The next test came when the bearing of his 
religious program on the lives of the inno- 
cent and the earnest is seen. We can say, 
perhaps, that the wicked mother simply 
went her own way, for which her son was 
not responsible. We cannot say this of 
Brand's little boy, nor of Agnes his wife. 
A sense of religious duty, because it is too 
narrow in its outlook, causes the death 
of the child. The Brand that refused to 
take the child to a place of health has the 
same vein of tin possessed by the Brand 
who was so inexorable with his mother. 
He will not leave the valley to save the 
child's life because he is torn between love 
and duty. But the ruling motive here is 
close to spiritual pride. He fears what the 
people will say about his consistency. The 
voice of conscience in the person of Gerd 
does not free itself from its baser nature. 
Because Brand does not distinguish this 
from the voice of God he fails in the second 
great test. The test in the case of Agnes 
is likewise a failure. All through his trials 
Brand has been severe upon himself, and 
upon others he has been harder than God. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 215 

In hardness he broke the bruised reed and 
quenched the smoking flax of Agnes's life. 
So it was with the other tests. Of course 
a church built by the rewards his mother 
had won from sin could never be a fit place 
in which to worship a God of "no com- 
promise." The tainted dollar would ever 
remain tainted and accursed, to whatever 
use it be put. The same philosophy of 
religion prevented the people from the 
normal occupations of life and ultimately 
led to Brand's rejection. When he follows 
his ideal to its absolute end he arrives 
at last in an ice-church of which he is the 
sole member with only Gerd, his accusing 
conscience, for an audience. The forces 
that have made all previous tests a failure 
now operate upon his own soul. By iron 
will and conscience alone shall no man be 
saved. 

"All or Nothing" in Modern Life 

The problem here set forth is the con- 
scious possession of every earnest social 
and religious worker of the day. How to 
bring civic, mental, moral, and religious 



£16 CHRIST AND THE 

salvation to an indifferent people is the 
heart-breaking problem which faced Brand 
and which faces very many of us. We feel 
the exact truth of Ibsen's withering scorn 
upon the laissez faire attitude and shallow 
self -contents of his age. It is the picture 
also of our own half-hearted age. Were 
there not here and there a Brand to hurl 
himself in defiance against its half-truths 
and whole lies, against its half-formed im- 
pulses of good, its half -realized measures of 
reform, its half-lived religion, humanity 
would rot. But when such Brands have 
thrown themselves away, giving life itself a 
protest, their voice has been like the voice 
of one crying in the wilderness. The light 
has shined only in an uncomprehending 
darkness. The problem comes home to us 
in most vivid way. Where can we find the 
solution? The march of the masses toward 
the better land is so slow. The few earnest 
leaders of reform would have long since 
entered into the promised land, but the 
lagging rear guard of the unseeing and un- 
believing holds back their steps, preventing 
even them from entering in. From some 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 217 

far mountain top they see the vision of 
what might have been, of what shall be, 
but in their loneliness there they lay them 
down to die. Long, long afterward the 
rear guard catches up in time to build them 
a tomb. That this should be the fate of 
the world's earnest souls is the ever-abiding 
tragedy of our humanity. Brand and Pro- 
metheus are proclaimed brothers across 
the confused and noisy ages. 

Yet there is something to be said for the 
slow rank and file. They represent the 
practical side of life. The fiery heroism 
of Phillips and of Garrison is matched by 
the more practical heroism of a patient 
and waiting Lincoln. The vanguard of 
reform must proclaim abstract truths, and 
by training men's eyes upon the absolute 
and perfect, make them realize what, in 
the end, may be less absolute, but better, 
because it fits humanity. The idealist too 
often forgets that good does not really 
exist until it has left the clouds of abstract 
principles and has taken form in life. 

Most often to the idealist the picture 
seems spoiled when it leaves the abstract 



218 CHRIST AND THE 

and is seen realized in the midst of human 
weakness and error. Yet the imperfect 
good seems to be of very great value to 
God. It is God's way of bringing the per- 
fect day. 

The reformer blazes the way of "no 
compromise with evil," proclaiming from 
every housetop his "all or nothing" philoso- 
phy. He has his mission and his place, 
but blessed to humanity are those who 
follow behind, patient to achieve what 
to-day is possible, and working for the 
better day. 

He who refuses the least because he can- 
not have all is equal in sin with him that 
refuses all. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 219 



CHAPTER XVII 

"WHERE LOVE IS, GOD IS" 

Failure from an Overemphasized 
Individualism 

Let us sum up the sources of failure 
in Brand's life and ascertain, if we can, 
the guideposts to a solution of his prob- 
lem. 

The failure of Brand's religious ideals 
sprang, first of all, from his failure to realize 
truly the world of human relations. The 
first commandment, to love God with all 
the heart, is accompanied by a second which 
requires one to evidence that love by 
loving his neighbor as himself. Brand 
forgot that there was a second command- 
ment. Yet the second commandment is 
the practical side of religion without which 
the first is nothing. It is a terrible thing 
to have a perfectionist of this kind in the 



220 CHRIST AND THE 

family, as Brand's mother, child, and wife 
too dearly learned. To love God with all 
the heart was Brand's abstract ideal. It 
had no earthly meaning at all until it began 
to be evidenced in a world of human rela- 
tions. The best evidence of his love for 
God would have been shown by a deeper 
and farther reaching sympathy for his gross 
and sinful mother. Little Alf, too, had 
his right to life and self-expression, which 
bulked as truly and as largely in the thought 
of God as any fancied duty of Brand toward 
any community. Brand was living for a 
world which was all too narrow. There 
was a future and a distance as well as a 
passing moment. That was a diabolical 
religious fatalism that could calmly look 
on Alf 's death as the expiation of his grand- 
mother's sin, or even to be acquiesced 
in as discipline for Brand and Agnes. 
Too often, in such lives as Brand's, Satan 
appears as an angel of light. His supreme 
duty at that moment was toward the little 
boy, for whom God had made him re- 
sponsible. That was an arrogant egotism 
in Brand which presumed the neighbor- 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 221 

hood would go to the bad if he left it. God 
has many means of bringing and preserving 
his kingdom. He is never shut up to a 
single instrument. "Remember," said a 
shortsighted friend to a young theological 
student, "while you are studying Hebrew 
souls are dying." Such narrowness as- 
sumes that God has limited means of carry- 
ing on his work, and that he cannot wait 
for men to prepare themselves. All such 
theories fail because they consider the sub- 
ject apart from the wider and greater world. 
There is no ideal so great that it should 
turn us from the real duty of the hour. 
But some one says, "Did not Christ say, 
'Let the dead bury their dead'?" Yes, 
but a careful reading will disclose that 
these were excuses by which men were 
attempting to escape participation in the 
closing ordeal and passion of Jesus's life. 
These were trivial duties which were being 
put forward as justification for neglecting 
the paramount duty. 

Then there was Agnes. Brand never 
could have made the demands on her which 
he did if he had rightly respected her per- 



£22 CHRIST AND THE 

sonality. A mother's love is one of the 
God-given things that by its tender senti- 
ment and beauty, a full-blown flower of 
life, keeps humanity from corrupting. It 
is insufficient to say that Brand did not 
recognize it because it had never appeared 
in his mother's life. That was doubtless 
true. That was a part of his tragedy. 
Failure to appreciate Agnes' s love was, 
nevertheless, his sin. That is one of the 
most exquisite pictures of modern litera- 
ture — Agnes at the window on Christmas 
Eve. We may be sure God has no quarrel 
with such a love as that, though Brand was 
sure he did. 

There used to be a theory that to love 
wife, husband, child, or friend sacrincially 
was the idolatrous evidence of an absence 
of love for God. I do not know who 
broached this hoary heresy. It is in unity 
with the worst elements of paganism. To 
say God took your child because you loved 
him too much is of a piece with saying that 
it is your duty to offer your child to Moloch 
or to cast him to the sacred alligator because 
you love him. God is never jealous of your 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 223 

human love. What a travesty is such a 
thought upon Jesus 's teaching that love 
for man is the evidence of love for God! 
When Brand snuffed out the candle of 
Agnes's longing for her boy, he committed 
murder in the name of God. 

It is no wonder that such a dreamer 
was unable, with all his ideals, to lead 
his people to the light. He could not 
understand people because by his very 
upbringing he was out of sympathy with 
men and women. He laid down im- 
possible demands because his program, 
while it was possible to a man living 
alone in a vast world, was impossible to 
men living in a world of relations. This 
is the real problem at the heart of many 
of the vagaries and excrescences of Christi- 
anity. Monasticism, asceticism, celibacy — 
these are its children. People are so slow 
to realize that a man can be a full-rounded 
Christian only in a world of normal human 
relations. Such a Christian a man cannot 
be in a monastery, in a retreat, or in a 
religious shell of any kind. He rises or he 
falls with his attitude toward a world of 



2U CHRIST AND THE 

relations. If he cannot there religiously 
adjust himself, he has religiously failed. 
At the heart of all such systems is an in- 
sufferable egotism. It assumes that our 
individual salvation is the principal thing 
in all the universe. In truth, we are not 
worth saving until we can forget our mor- 
bidly selfish desire to be saved, in an altru- 
istic desire to be saviors. Only saviors 
can be saved, if we but had the sense to 
know it. 

When Brand did to the death that flower 
of Agnes's heart, her memory of her boy, 
he did away with the most priceless spiritual 
treasure of his home and heart. 

Failure from a False View of 
Sacrifice 

Brand's failure sprang also from his 
false notion of sacrifice. He valued sacri- 
fice, and supposed God valued it, for its 
own sake. A sacrifice can never be de- 
manded as a sort of spiritual gymnastic. 
Yet this was the type of sacrifice that Brand 
demanded of Agnes. It was called out to 
meet a merely theoretical exigency. Her 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 225 

fondling of the child's garments was as- 
sumed as a revolt against the divine will 
in his death. Brand did not see that he 
was far more accountable than God for the 
lad's dying. It was not a matter of refusing 
the hag with the foul child at the door. 
Other clothing would have kept him equally 
warm. The demand was for the killing 
of the finest instincts of her mother heart. 
It was not sacrifice with a meaning. It 
was sacrifice for a theory. Neither Brand 
nor God himself would have had a right 
to require it. There is a domain of the 
human heart, a sanctuary of the individual- 
ity, which God considers too precious to 
violate, where only men dare tread with 
sacrilegious feet. Into this holy place the 
Christ will enter only upon man's invitation. 
"Behold, I stand at the door and knock." 
Jesus was ever a respecter of personality. 
Some surrenders can be made only at the 
cost of spiritual idiocy, because the soul 
has a right to itself. Therefore any sacri- 
fice of this self which has not some higher 
purpose is a crime against the individual. 
Even the cross could not have been incum- 



22G CHRIST AND THE 

bent upon Jesus except for a great practical 
purpose. That practical purpose was no 
theoretical propitiation of wills either — 
it was a practical redemption of men, or else 
it was heaven's supreme injustice. 

God never calls men to sacrifice for the 
sake of a theory nor for the sake of sacrifice*. 
True sacrifice is deep with practical purpose. 
It has for its object the welfare not of the 
individual, but of his fellows. Had this 
truth been better understood, the horror 
of asceticism would never have darkened 
the world. My starved, belabored, and 
failing body, if it be starved and belabored 
for my own soul's good, hides a more starved 
and more belabored soul. There is soul 
health for me only when it is starved and 
belabored to some true purpose, the help 
and betterment of my fellow men. I may 
not seek sacrifice for my soul's good, but 
if it come as the result of serving and 
redeeming my fellows, I am not to turn 
from it. To avoid it then is to lose my 
soul. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 227 

And Mercy too Is a Virtue 

Ibsen points out a third source of 
Brand's failure by the lips of the doctor 
who witnesses the household tragedy. He 
says to Brand, 

. . . "Your Love-account is still 
A virgin chapter, blank and bare." 

This was the deepest source of failure. We 
cannot help realizing how predisposed to 
this sin Brand would be by hereditary in- 
fluence and training. His childhood had 
been loveless. His early home had been 
loveless, just as his mother's marriage had 
likewise been loveless. But we must be- 
ware laying too many shortcomings to 
heredity. Perhaps the very absence of 
love from that childhood home should have 
yielded a keener appreciation of love in 
his later home, if his own heart had not 
been so hard. Our difficulty here is easily 
made. How far Ibsen fell into it we do 
not know. Brand's lovelessness sprang 
not from any passing over in heredity from 
his mother, for character is never trans- 



228 CHRIST AND THE 

mitted. His lovelessness sprang from weak- 
nesses of character that were like his 
mother's. Hers was a material selfish- 
ness; his was a spiritual selfishness. The 
lovelessness in each case sprang from ego- 
tism. But we must remember that it 
could not be inherited. Brand's loveless- 
ness was all his own. 

We shall see the truth of this when we 
look back at the beginning of Brand's 
life and remember that his religion began 
in a scorn of the weaknesses and follies of 
men, which he applied also to the men them- 
selves. It was Agnes, his good angel, who 
persuaded him that his native village was 
as worthy a place as any for his work. 
Brand scorned men as well as men's sins, 
and no true religion or service can be built 
upon the scorn of men. That was the fatal 
plan in life which landed him at last in the 
hopeless isolation of the ice-church. Agnes 
was his last bond of connection with the 
world of men. Brand could have developed 
his best self through the side of mercy and 
of love alone. His ideal failed because 
it was so far from the haunts of man's 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 229 

common needs. The multitudes' hunger 
was the realization of Jesus, and he refused 
to send them away until physical wants 
had been supplied. His word was strong 
because it was so humble as to be in keeping 
with human toils, the lowly tasks of fishing, 
the ungarnished room of the peasant, the 
coarse food of the hut. These might be the 
surroundings for a Lord's Supper of holiest 
communion. A yielding of Brand to love 
would have opened new springs of power 
in his life and would have made possible 
the realization among men of the ideal that 
lured him on. It was a grievous wrong 
he did to Agnes's love in forbidding her the 
memory of her little boy. It was a far 
deeper injury he did to his own soul. 

One so deficient on this side of character 
would be religiously impractical and could 
only lead up barren heights where it was 
impossible for common men to follow. 
"His categorical imperative . . . 'all or 
nothing,' does not bear the strain of experi- 
ence. Life is simpler, is not to be lived at 
such an intolerable tension." 1 



1 Huneker, Egoists, p. 334. 



230 CHRIST AND THE 

Ibsen himself spoke of Brand as having 
climbed "toward the peaks, toward the 
stars, and toward the great silence," 1 and 
this is poetically true enough. But the 
One who lived to call himself Son of man 
has shown us that the heights which lead 
us away from lowly human sympathies are 
heights only in vain imagination. The 
religious luster that gathers about Brand's 
head is largely fictitious. We admire his 
sacrifice because it was great, but it must 
eternally fail because at heart it was suffered 
for an individualistic aim. We must learn 
to shun even goodness that starves our 
human sympathies. The way to the heights 
is still through the depths of a lively human 
sympathy. Brand was too selfish and too 
wanting in humility to reach them, and 
this in spite of all his sacrifice. "Though 
I give my body to be burned, and have not 
love, it profiteth me nothing." Olson has dis- 
criminatingly said that Brand's Christ was 
only the martyr, and that he never rose to 
the better thought of Christ as Redeemer. 2 

1 Quoted in Ibsen on His Merits, Sir E. R. Russell, p. 106. 

2 Olson, Ibsen's Brand. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 231 

We can best apply here the thought of 
Tolstoy as the final test of Brand's charac- 
ter: "Where love is, God is"; and by the 
same token where love is not, God is not. 



CONCLUSION 



CHAPTER XVIII 
THE PROBLEM IN MODERN THOUGHT 

The Modern "Pessimists 

While in the foregoing studies we have 
been discovering the various phases of the 
problem of evil and suffering as they have 
risen to prominence in the literature of 
the ages, we have also been disclosing the 
sources of modern doubt. From Rousseau, 
through Schopenhauer, down to the pessi- 
mistic writers of our own time, we have 
had a sort of apostolic succession of despair 
that has exerted great influence upon exist- 
ing culture. 

Of this school Grierson says: 1 "We had 
in the pre-Raphaelite movement the art 
romance of modern melancholy; we have 
the poetic sentiment of it in the dramas of 
M. Maeterlinck; we have in Wagner's 
Lohengrin and Tannhauser the musical 

1 Grierson, Modern Mysticism, pp. 39-44. 
235 



236 CHRIST AND THE 

emotion of it. . . . It is beauty and longing 
in Rossetti, beauty and despair in Maeter- 
linck, beauty and madness in Wagner. 
... It comprises a vast social world from 
the cynical despair of Montmartre to the 
sentimental despair of the Madeleine. The 
first is a frank confession of a glaring social 
fact; the second, a religious and secret con- 
fession of the same troubled state of the 
soul. This art is not a Latin and Parisian 
development; all nations understand it, 
for the language and gesture of modern 
Melancholy are universal." . . . "The pes- 
simism of our day has neither tears nor 
moments of mystical joy. It is scientific 
and aesthetic, and the consolation, if any, 
lies in resignation. The pessimists of the 
present day are of two kinds: those who 
feel keenly, but are incapable of deep 
thought, and those who cannot help medi- 
tating, analyzing, and classifying." 1 

Readjustment of Ideas 

This concerns only the great leaders of 
pessimistic thought. There is a great fol- 

1 Grierson, Celtic Temperament, pp. 69-70. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 237 

lowing among the common people, and 
especially among those who for one reason 
or another have been alienated from the 
church. The works of pessimism are the 
most thumbed and frayed of any in our 
public libraries. Schopenhauer's chapter 
in defense of suicide, to judge by worn pages, 
is more perused than that of any other 
volume one can find. The causes for such 
feeling among the common people are not 
to be found in the shortcomings of philoso- 
phy, but, rather, in the forces of modern 
civilization. The uncertainty caused by 
the break-up of traditional views regarding 
God, religion, the Bible, and the authority 
of the church has offered the desired 
excuse to men whose hearts were already 
weaned from religion and to others who had 
not the mind nor the diligence to seek the 
truth. However we may deplore it, the 
church is not speaking with the old appeal 
to authority, and where it is so speaking 
it is not speaking with any abiding effective- 
ness. The age demands a gospel which 
shall carry in itself the evidences of its 
divine authority, without the "Thus it is 



238 CHRIST AND THE 

said" that has ever been characteristic of 
the teaching of scribes and Pharisees. 
Because too large a portion of the teachers 
of the church are still quoting infallible 
authorities rather than relying on the 
eternal elements of verification in the con- 
sciences of men, she has in many instances 
lost her distinctive place of leadership and 
failed in her task. Among the masses there 
is overfullness of material comforts; there 
are disillusioned religious hopes; there are 
doubts induced by the dissolution of old 
systems of thought, of old understandings 
of the natural world, by the unsatisfactory 
nature of spiritual proof which makes it 
compelling only for the spiritually minded. 
Too often has the church depended upon the 
fear of an artificial retribution, and too 
often has she made her appeal for salvation 
to the sordid and the selfish interests of 
human nature. Men need to be made to 
see that retribution for sin is a reality more 
terrible than they have dreamed. They 
need to see that the effect of sin upon the 
soul, upon the highest uses and possibilities 
of personality, is more terrible than any 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 239 

pictured flames of brimstone. They need 
to realize that, so far as human insight can 
go, the damage is irreparable apart from a 
Divine and Inscrutable Mercy. But the 
chief emphasis should never be put upon 
this negative aspect. The man who is 
scared into the Kingdom from selfish motives 
of salvation has but a feeble and wavering 
start toward that spirit which was in 
Christ. The appeal should be ever positive. 
The case should be fairly stated. There 
should be such an emphasis given that the 
terrible and destructive nature of sin should 
be made to fill the minds of men with un- 
accustomed awe. But the motive for sal- 
vation should, in this age, be put upon the 
highest possible plane. Loyalty to a divine 
world order — loyalty to one's race, to one's 
nation, to one's friends, loyalty to the God 
of righteousness, which means, in the last 
analysis of all, loyalty to one's highest 
self — should be the keynote of appeal. 
The thought should be less of escape from 
that which is undesirable in the future, 
and more of one's escape from that which 
in the present hour mars and destroys life 



240 CHRIST AND THE 

and, so far as human insight can reach, must 
be eternally marring and destructive. 

Is this only a new phraseology for a very 
old truth taught from the beginning? Let 
us not neglect nor despise it for that reason. 
Why should we seek to keep our evangel 
ever in the same words? Why not speak 
it in words that men can understand? If 
the present interest is predominantly scien- 
tific, then it is the duty of this age to use 
every discovery of science to drive home her 
truth to scientific minds. 

The great spiritual verities, whatever the 
form of speech, stand out as an inalienable 
portion of the human soul. As such they 
can never be permanently lost, nor kept 
from coming at last into their kingdom. 
The form of man's thinking changes and 
is bound to change with every added insight 
from nature and life. The great moral 
verities are as indestructible as man's soul. 
There is no more need to fear the com- 
pulsory readjustments of modern thought 
than to fear that the sun would refuse to 
rise because men have changed from the 
Ptolemaic to the Copernican astronomy. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT £41 

It is the same set of facts that is being 
interpreted in either case. The facts are 
more important for life than interpretation, 
and the facts remain. 

With such a grasp of essential truth the 
church can stand forth boldly in any age. 
She must recognize the necessity for con- 
stant readjustment of the setting of truth. 
Yet she knows that religious truth cannot 
be permanently hindered by any discovery 
that can be made. She should stand with 
attitude of honesty and openness toward all 
truth. To slavishly defend any theory 
against overwhelming light is to cherish 
tradition more than truth. In this respect 
the state of the Christian Church to-day 
is far more hopeful than it has been since 
the early days of the Reformation. 

Misconception About Happiness 

Modern pessimism is also much con- 
cerned over the unsatisfactory nature of 
human happiness. The increase of material 
comforts, the advance of medical science 
in the alleviation of pain, the increasingly 
successful struggle for material things, have 



242 CHRIST AND THE 

led to an overemphasis of the importance 
of physical happiness. A recent writer 1 
has pointed out that if happiness were the 
supreme goal, the pursuit of happiness 
would be the highest good; but happiness 
can never be the highest consideration in a 
moral and spiritual world. The fertile 
source of this despair has been in the failure 
to realize the relative nature of happiness. 
Any inventory of the sum of happiness 
must include the moral and spiritual, as 
well as the mental and physical natures. 
The one-sidedness of this despair is clearly 
shown by the character of the people most 
influenced by it. They are for the most 
part people who have every physical means 
to happiness. Their misery springs out of 
the inability of an overplus of good things 
to prove permanently satisfying. It is just 
this oversight of the necessity for the moral 
and spiritual elements in any true happiness 
that is the seat of their difficulty. 

The modern man is no longer satisfied 
with the mere transfer of the problem to 
another world. The thought of a sort of 

1 Ward, Realm of Ends, Gifford Lectures, 1911; pp. 339-340. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 243 

physical happiness in the life to come as a 
recompense for that which is missed here 
does not appeal to him. He has now too 
much of a sense of the unsatisfying nature 
of physical fullness to dream that such can 
be the reward of his soul. If heaven is to 
be a place of eternal wassail, in which is 
heard "the shout of them that feast," the 
man whose motive is the "main chance" 
is likely to prefer the short and satisfying 
wassail of this life to the eternal but un- 
certain one of the life to come. It is not 
strange that he recognizes his kinship with 
the self-seeking so-called religious brother 
who denies himself strictly now with a 
lively anticipation of physical delights to 
come. It seems strange that the un- 
spiritual nature of all such conceptions 
should not be apparent to the most be- 
nighted. We must find our sum of happi- 
ness, not in the absence of physical pain, 
nor in the lack of tragedy in life, not in 
continual success and the smile of material 
fortune, but in the deeper joys of the soul 
which can rise triumphant over every hour 
of pain and find songs in every night of 



244 CHRIST AND THE 

loss. Such a soul has already begun to real- 
ize a blessedness which is eternal because it 
is already a part of the personality and can- 
not be destroyed by any earthly shock. The 
world did not give and cannot take it away. 
Our unhappiness more often springs from 
some lack in the higher realm of the spirit 
than from any failure of physical comfort. 
It springs often from the very loftiness of 
our aims, and because the spirit will not be 
satisfied with unspiritual things. The ani- 
mal knows little of suffering or pain because 
its pain is confined to the physical realm. 
The man suffers by reason of his higher 
spiritual consciousness. Out of this grasp 
of the soul after higher self-realization 
springs our unhappiness and also our peace. 
In the words of Doctor Royce, "Were there 
no longing in Time, there would be no peace 
in Eternity." 1 

The Presence of Moral and Physical 
Disorder 

The sense of the presence of moral and 
physical disorder in the world has in our 

1 The World and the Individual, 2d Series, p. 386. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 245 

time become almost a new sense with its 
new altruistic and social application. Hence 
the despair arising from this source is most 
keenly felt in modern life. The disorders 
of society, which seem by reason of their 
complicated nature beyond the power of 
man to correct, give rise to a very deep 
despair. Why aspiring men should set 
upon tasks of human amelioration, giving 
life and happiness for the social salvage 
of individuals who do not seem strongly 
to desire salvation, is one of the perplexing 
questions of many a life. Many a man has 
faced his moral and social responsibility 
in the bitter mood of Hamlet — 

The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, 
That ever I was born to set it right! 

The amelioration of pain has heightened 
our sense of the evil of that which remains 
uncorrected. The commonness of luxury 
and affluence has written in deeper lines the 
contrast of those who are inexorably barred 
from hope. Ignorance, poverty, and want, 
from which escape is made impossible by the 
exactions of organized society, forbid spirit- 



246 CHRIST AND THE 

ual repose. The suffering of innocent chil- 
dren for the sins of the fathers creates a 
new horror for the mind. 

These dark thoughts are only deepened 
by the occurrence of catastrophes that 
sweep away guilt and innocence, culture 
and ignorance, redeemers and debasers of 
men in a common ruin. To these are added 
the personal flings of fortune which seem 
with malevolent perseverance to keep us 
back from our highest hopes and our best 
service. 

For all such it will be seen that the indi- 
vidual is attempting to interpret the prob- 
lem of his life without the key of complete 
experience. 1 The judgment on God's good- 
ness and on the Divine Providence of the 
present order should certainly rest on some- 
thing broader than the partial experience of 
pleasure or pain that is given in the present 
hour. 2 It is as if the child should judge of 



1 Bowne, The Essence of Religion, p. 67. 

2 "The actual existence of moral evil in our world is only 
incompatible with a theocracy, if God is the author of this 
evil; if, in other words, God is the sole free agent and his 
so-called creatures only so many impotent vessels of honor 
or dishonor. Then, indeed, God and the world would be 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 247 

the love of his parents by their refusal or 
acquiescence in his requests. When we see 
life in retrospect it becomes apparent that 
for us the refusals of life have often been 
the greatest blessings. This much we can 
discover when we see them in the larger 
relations which years and experience bring. 
And as for one's overwhelming and thank- 
less tasks, one finds in the acceptance of 
their challenge the summoning and culti- 
vation of one's highest powers. In life's 
afterthought they appear bearing the most 
precious and most inalienable gifts. "In 
the conquest over suffering all the nobler 
gifts of the spirit, all the richer experiences 
of life, consist." 1 

Men of another age, coming thus far, 
might have been able to sit down satisfied, 
but it is certain we of this age cannot. We 



bad together, but God only would be morally evil. And 
that, surely, is a supposition as absurd as it is monstrous. 
Before the presence of evil in the world can be cited as evidence 
that God is not present in it, it must be shown that the evil 
is such as not merely to retard but absolutely to prevent the 
onward progress of moral order and render the attainment 
of the upper limit of moral evolution forever impossible" 
(Ward, Realm of Ends, p. 375). 

1 Royce, The World and the Individual, 2d Series, p. 409. 



«-18 CHRIST AND THE 

cannot say, "Because I have been able 
from suffering to seize a higher good, let 
me be satisfied that other individuals 
around me have the same privilege." We 
cannot escape our sense of responsibility 
for the unalleviated suffering of others. 
There is no joy in others' pain, though that 
pain be in them the way to spiritual values. 
We cannot forget the gusty night when One 
who was going bravely to crucifixion used 
every means to save His disciples from a 
like fate. And though like Him who 
received His final discipline through the 
experience of the cross, we win our way 
hardly into life, we are not blind to the 
moral blackness of those who furnished 
the cross and set its cruel beams up in His 
life. In other words, we can through faith 
reach a personal solution while as yet the 
larger question remains unsolved. 

Lack of Adequate Motive 

The sense of aimlessness which formed a 
fundamental of Schopenhauer's philosophy 
has characterized the thought and life of 
many of his pessimistic disciples. It was 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 249 

inevitable in any scheme which found the 
fountain-head of Being in no higher source 
than that of non-personal and aimless 
Will. Many lives are lost in the divine 
order, and give way to hopelessness be- 
cause their life-plan and motive are too 
small to satisfy an eternal spirit. Despair 
is inevitable to the life which lives only for 
the passing day, or which has not caught 
its bearing in the higher relations. That 
night in the upper room, surrounded by the 
conscious breakdown of many dreams, in 
personal danger from relentless enemies, 
the scattering of the discipleship imminent, 
his own betrayal in process of accomplish- 
ment, called to the petty task of rebuking 
selfish disciples by acting the role of the 
humblest servant, Jesus would have fallen 
into deepest despair had it not been for the 
consciousness that he came from God and 
went to God. The thought of source and 
end, of beginning and goal, made every task 
and every humiliation a joy. Because he 
saw his life in its larger relations, every 
temptation to sadness was removed. A 
great measure of the world's despair comes 



250 CHRIST AND THE 

from an inability to realize the meaning of 
common tasks, labors, and disappointments. 
It arises from absence of adequate motive 
in life. The passing hour in which Faust 
sought his satisfaction had nothing what- 
ever to give him of joy, until he hit upon 
its discovery in a higher relation. Our 
lives, so long as they dwell upon a momen- 
tary pleasure or pain, success or victory, 
will remain in constant peril of the violence 
of circumstance. It is not until the larger 
relations of life begin to appear that the 
passing moment sinks into the wider plane 
of experience. 

"We judge the goods of life by standards 
of sensuous comfort and worldly success, 
and God has a very different standard. 
We desire to be happy; God wishes us to be 
holy. We look at the outward appearance; 
God looketh at the heart. We look at the 
seen and temporal; God looketh at the 
unseen and eternal. We seek to make God 
the servant of our worldly ease and com- 
fort, while he is seeking to make us his 
children, meet to dwell with him in light. 
A great many of our difficulties disappear 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 251 

when we occupy the divine standpoint and 
view things under the form of the eternal. 
God is not much concerned to make us 
any of the things which the natural man 
desires to be — rich, prosperous, successful, 
as men count success. These are acci- 
dents that count for little in the eternal 
years. Hence the apparent indifference, 
and even cruelty, of the divine dealings 
with us. We set our heart on things one 
may not safely have. We desire things 
which are of no essential moment or abiding 
significance. We seek to rest in an earthly 
paradise, while God is preparing us for a 
heavenly. Thus God's plans and ours are 
often at variance because we are not yet 
able to appreciate that he is preparing some 
better thing for us. But we gradually 
grow toward the insight." 1 

The Breakdown of Religious Ideals 

A consideration of the elements of despair 
would be incomplete without an account 
of that deadlock which occurs with the 
breakdown of spiritual ideals. Usually, 

1 Bowne, The Essence of Religion, pp. 60-61. 



252 CHRIST AND THE 

these ideals are a one-sided view of some 
portion of the gospel which in the heyday 
of discovery and appropriation seems to be 
a full, perfect, and complete answer to the 
deepest problem of life, and which is shown 
to be inadequate only by the shock of 
individual experience. This truth is il- 
lustrated in Brand with his ideal of a per- 
fect surrender to the will of God. The 
ideal of perfect surrender was not wrong. 
The weakness lay in its application. There 
are many things which God will not demand. 
He will never require that which outrages 
personality. The foremost article in the 
creed of Christ was respect for the indi- 
vidual. He never needlessly wounded or 
transgressed it. "I stand at the door, and 
knock: ... if any man open the door, I will 
come in." Brand used his own renunciation 
as a club to beat other lives into subjection. 
In his very scorn for the weaknesses of the 
unspiritual lay the source of failure. One 
may be as severe as he pleases with his own 
life. He needs to grant to others an equal 
liberty. This Brand could not do, so he 
was filled with a continual dissatisfaction. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 253 

He was dissatisfied with self, because his 
continual introspection kept disclosing new 
fields unconquered by the principle, "All 
or nothing." So he was driven to make 
sacrifices which God never demanded. His 
theory consistently and universally applied 
would scorn every good gift of God and 
make life impossible, ending in a loveless, 
lonely impasse. Because the human ele- 
ment was wanting from his religious zeal, 
he ends far off in the ice-church, utterly 
bereft of any following save the mad girl, 
Gerd, while from his heart has been torn 
that human love which alone could make 
him perfect. 

This conflict between the world and the 
spirit is a very real one to the keenly con- 
scientious soul. It recurs wherever there is 
literal interpretation of divine commands 
without the guiding light of reason. To 
very many the human reason is too prone 
to sin and to speak after the manner of self- 
ishness. This forms the torment of sensi- 
tive minds. And very often this peculiar 
sensitiveness undoes itself. A life given 
over to minute introspection of unessen- 



254 CHRIST AND THE 

tials is very liable to miss the great mo- 
ralities. That case is not unusual in which 
a person is torn by self-examination for any 
lingering "roots of bitterness" who with- 
out compunction conveys slander against 
an enemy. One such was known who was 
ever in this state of tortured conscientious- 
ness about the "roots of bitterness," who 
ingenuously told of commanding the small 
son to sink in his seat upon the train, that 
he might appear to the conductor under 
age. The climax came with the recital of 
how both mother and son escaped alto- 
gether the vigilance of the conductor and 
rode free. Perhaps the smallness of soul 
aided the escape. It is not amazing that 
when such pursuit of religious ideals is 
watched from the outside it leads to utter 
repudiation of religion by men of the world. 
And eventually the life of those who thus 
pursue it drops into a hollow mockery of 
religious reality, intent alone upon tithing 
its mint, anise, and cummin. 

For the sincere soul it is a distressing 
fact that no truly religious ideal is ever 
perfectly achieved. It may be and often 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 255 

is, in theory, in those minds which are 
given over to a lively imagination of virtues 
not actually possessed, and to those who 
are blinded by an assertive egotism to 
grave defects in personal thought and 
action. The moment one cries out to the 
passing emotion, to any subjective state 
of the soul, or to any condition of living, 
"Stay, thou art so fair," he is in the con- 
dition of Faust. That moment he passes 
into the power of the devil. 

It is the condition of a healthy soul to be 
ever continuing the fight for perfection. 
Even Christ is represented as becoming per- 
fect through life's deep experience. "With- 
in the province of the inner life an earnest 
effort is itself a fact,' 91 and in the intensity 
and perfection of our struggle, the com- 
pleteness of our gift of ourselves to the 
search, not in the perfection of our attain- 
ment, must lie our peace and our reward. 
Stevenson's words are ever true, that "to 
travel hopefully is better than to arrive." 
Arrivals are the greatest disasters to the 
human soul. They mean that the soul is 

1 Eucken, The Truth of Religion, p. 409. 



256 CHRIST AND THE 

satisfied at last with less than the eternal. 
That means that, for all practical purposes, 
the soul is lost. 

One thing life should teach us, and that 
is to beware of havens. Many come into 
what they consider an unending haven of 
spiritual rest who are simply grounded upon 
shallows. The sons of God are content 
to sail God's unresting sea. It is peace 
enough and haven enough if they have on 
board the Heavenly Pilot. 

Resume of the Problem 

Modern thought is demanding a deeper- 
going and more thorough solution of the 
problem than has so far perhaps been 
philosophically attempted. It is not a suf- 
ficient sop to the clear-sighted to declare 
with Monism that evil is necessary as a 
foil or contrast to the good, nor that it is 
nonexistent — a form of mental error. Such 
a claim is too much contradicted by human 
experience. Nor is the modern mind able 
to rest in the assumption that God is him- 
self responsible for evil. 

The ancient dualistic view is equally 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 257 

repugnant. We are no longer willing to 
assign an eternity to evil in which it opposes 
itself to the good will of God. The view of 
a divided universe has become impossible 
to us. But the deeper problem is with us 
in intense form. The discoveries of science 
daily disclose new unities in the universe. 
Our own ideals call for the final and com- 
plete triumph of the good, and the banish- 
ment of evil. It is our ideal in society, and 
we feel that God can have no lesser end. 
How, then, are we to meet the dark ques- 
tion of the existence of evil in a world in 
which God is supreme? Philosophy's best 
word leaves the heart unsatisfied. As yet 
philosophy has not brought the satisfying 
answer. Its highest and best work has been 
to show that the problem is ameliorated 
in experience by the triumph of the timeless 
human spirit over passing wrongs and sor- 
rows, by showing the relative nature of 
evil, and how from its opposition arise 
the limitless aspirations of man. A final 
answer it has not given. 

Does not this deadlock point us to the 
only solution that is possible to finite minds, 



2.58 CHRIST AND THE 

namely, the personal and the individual? 
Will it ever be possible to strike the balance 
of logical contradictions and be at peace? 
There is no promise of such an attainment. 
Nevertheless, each one of us can answer 
the question in actual living. We can rise 
superior to every sorrow; we can gain 
strength of character from every tempta- 
tion; we can win discipline from every pain. 
We can in personal living transmute every 
evil into a larger good. The goal, whatever 
it be, must lie in this direction. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 259 



CHAPTER XIX 

JESUS OF NAZARETH AND THE PERSONAL 
SOLUTION 

The Individual Must Be Considered 
in Relations 

The popular thought concerning sin and 
salvation has been in one way too indi- 
vidualistic and in another not sufficiently 
so. We have thought of a man's sin as 
something for which society was mainly 
at fault, and of salvation as something that 
could be achieved by him alone. We 
have thought of the sufferings of the indi- 
vidual as if he were an isolated atom of the 
universe. This is natural, because suf- 
fering is in the end that of an individual. 

Our crosses are hewn from different trees, 

But we all must have our Calvaries; 

We may climb the height from a different side, 

But we eacji go up to be crucified; 

As we scale the steep another may share 

The dreadful load that our shoulders bear; 



260 CHRIST AND THE 

But the costliest sorrow is all our own, 
For on the summit we bleed alone. 1 

But he whose suffering is not lifted into the 
larger relationships has not learned life's 
lesson. His suffering has been in vain. 
So there is no solution of the problem of 
evil which considers the individual apart 
from his relations in society. We are 
beginning to see in an increasingly social 
age a truth that has been long in dawning, 
that the individual cannot be saved without 
being himself also measurably a savior of 
those about him. Any indifference toward 
his world of relations bars the individual 
from that salvation which he selfishly seeks, 
for, in our common life, there are many who 
go down by very reason of the temptation 
caused by social wrongs that are sanctioned 
and profited in by the more fortunate. 
There is coming over the minds of men a 
new source of despair. It is the despair 
that springs from a consciousness of profiting 
by another's sufferings and sins. Men 
begin to feel keenly their responsibility 
for a damnation of society toward which 

1 Frederic Lawrence Knowles, Love Triumphant, p. 45. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 261 

they have not yet learned their practical 
duty. The cry of helpless children, of un- 
happy women, of men made brutish by the 
exactions of poverty and toil, make all talk 
of peace of soul seem like the foolish bab- 
blings of idiotic joy at a funeral. 

For men who are doing nothing to relieve 
society of its burden of sin, wrong, and 
injustice to talk about blessedness strikes 
the modern world as hollow mockery. The 
truth is, we cannot enjoy blessedness as a 
passive experience. We are blessed only 
as our lives are bringing blessedness to 
others. This truth was illustrated in the 
life of our Master. He refused to think 
of his life apart from its relations. It had 
a source; it came from God; it had certain 
specific duties toward the souls amid which 
it moved, and there were certain definite 
purposes to be realized in the future. He 
dared enjoy no blessedness that was held 
in reserve for self. There was ever the ne- 
cessity of bringing his world to the knowl- 
edge and experience of God and of lifting 
his life into its larger relations. Pains and 
bufferings, the loneliness of scorn, the heart- 



262 CHRIST AND THE 

break of being despised and rejected by 
those whom he loved unto death, toils, 
privations, suborned witnesses, physical 
pain, the degradation of the cross became 
supreme sources of joy as he lifted his life 
into its larger relations. Nor is this truth 
an academic one. How unfortunate is that 
life which is so lost in the maze that it has 
nothing left to live for! What sorrows 
have been borne with brave spirit, "for 
the sake of the children"! How does the 
degradation of failure, loss, or ridicule rise 
into dignity as it is bravely borne for others, 
for a Cause yet to be born, for a Will that 
is perfect, or an End that is sure ! Wherever 
the philosophical solution of the problem 
of evil may lead us, it is certain that the 
practical solution is here. 

The Identification of God with Cosmic 
Life 

Jesus found the solution of the problem 
in the identification of God with the life 
of the world. If the claim of Jesus to 
Messiahship means anything, it means that 
we are to think of God as identifying him- 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT £63 

self with the life of the universe. Thus the 
groaning and travailing of the whole creation 
in pain has a divine interest and significance. 
Jesus's teaching about the fall of a sparrow 
being of moment to the Eternal was no 
mere poetic fancy. It was indicative of 
Jesus's whole thought of the relation of 
God to the world. Men who have learned 
only the fellowship of joy have scarcely 
scratched the surface-meaning of com- 
panionship. The fellowship in pain and 
peril is the fellowship that binds souls into 
one. That fellowship with his creation 
God desires. That is exactly what Jesus 
intends to tell us about God. God is a 
companion of our suffering, and lest our 
human understanding should fail to grasp 
so extravagant a truth, Jesus identifies 
himself with God. He tells the amazed 
disciples that he and the Father are one. 
Then he holds himself not aloof, but is 
wearied with the weariness of their journey - 
ings, is hungered in the famine of their mis- 
fortune, weeps with them at graves, suffers 
in the sickness of their little children, con- 
cerns himself in their catch of fish, and, 



264 CHRIST AND THE 

finally, makes the astounding claim, "I 
who am thus a part of your common life, 
I am God." 

What wonder these men stood in open- 
faced surprise attempting to drink in his 
meaning! It was like that silent hour of 
glory in the morning when you stand in 
the embrace of a great mountain. You 
see the limpid mountain lakes like gems 
set in a crown. You see the woods as if 
new-washed and fresh-tinted by an Eternal 
Hand set forth as if they were .your indi- 
vidual treasure. Far off you hear the silver 
bugles of the mountain cataracts calling 
to your soul. High up soars a hoary sum- 
mit that seems all but unattainable. Your 
soul cries out: "All this for me! How can I 
see it and live?" Thus must the vastness 
of this truth have come home to the dis- 
ciples, as they gathered up from it all they 
could comprehend, even as you pitch your 
little tent and build your camp fire, making 
provision for the common wants in the con- 
scious embrace of the old mountain. 

It is little wonder that Jesus 's message 
was received with scorn and ridicule. It 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 265 

is not surprising that he was slain for 
blasphemy. It is no wonder that there 
still linger men who deny his Deity. It is 
such a stupendous thought. I have no 
doubt that there are many more who would 
deny, but that custom, creed, familiarity 
with the statement of truth have hid from 
them the overwhelming nature of Jesus 's 
claim for himself and for God. When we 
say that Jesus is a High Priest, touched 
with the feeling of our infirmities, and then 
that Jesus was God, we mean that God 
suffers in our sufferings, is agonized in our 
agonies, enfolds our little lives with a love 
more sympathetic and tender than that of 
our own mothers. 

In the words of a modern philosopher, 
"In the absolute oneness of God with the 
sufferer, in the concept of the suffering and 
therefore triumphant God, lies the logical 
solution of the problem of evil." 1 

I am well aware that this leaves some 
natural problems unsolved. What becomes 
measurably clear to us regarding lives that 
perish by sickness and age is not so clear 

1 Royce, Studies in Good and Evil, p. 14. 



Zm CHRIST AND THE 

when we think of great natural disasters. 
Here our horror arises mostly from the fact 
of the wholesale character of the disaster. 
An individual case stirs our pity and 
sympathy for but a moment. We say, 
"What are a few days of life more or less, 
in the eternal years?" We think of dis- 
asters worse than death, and of the indi- 
vidual life as only suffering from ills in- 
cident upon a system which an All-Wisdom 
knows to be the ultimate best for character 
and life. A great calamity intensifies our 
questioning many fold. To us the fisher- 
man, drifted out with his dory in the fog, 
gives his life as the expected toll of the sea. 
A thousand Titanic victims go down to- 
gether, and we question the divine goodness. 
Such questionings, inevitable as they may 
seem, find no adequate answer in time, 
though their case is in reality no deeper 
than the suffering of a single individual. 
Jesus does not present any theoretical solu- 
tion at all. He offers us only the practical 
one. He asks first for a suspension of 
judgment. Of life's solutions he says, "Ye 
cannot bear them now." On the other 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 267 

hand, he asserts that they are not, as many 
have thought, all evidences of divine wrath 
upon sin. "Those upon whom the tower 
of Siloam fell and slew them, think ye that 
they were sinners above all men that 
dwelt in Jerusalem?" He asks us to trust 
God and to rest sure in the Eternal Good- 
ness behind the universe. 

The Identification of God with Human 
Achievement 

Not only does Jesus represent God as 
interested in the natural phenomena affect- 
ing life. He represents him as identified 
with human achievement. What deeper 
meaning of the incarnation can be dis- 
covered? Jesus identifies God as living 
and working in him. The works that he 
is able to do are less of himself than of the 
Father. It is the Father that works 
through him. If they cannot believe him 
by reason of his personality, let them look 
back of him to his works, as the evidence 
of God. They surely ought not to continue 
blinded by partisanship in the presence 
of the works of God. Every good and per- 



268 CHRIST AND THE 

feet work comes from God, is infilled with 
God, is directed of God, is a part of the 
perfection of his universe through human 
achievement. Jesus's message was that 
God desires to work through men with the 
same freedom that now he works through 
nature. To man are given will and indi- 
viduality, that he may become a partner 
with God in the final result. Here lies 
the efficient reason for the possibility of 
evil. It is only through moral choice and 
the conquest of evil that we can become 
partakers with God in a moral universe. 
We become thereby not mere creatures but 
creators as well. "The real world must be 
the joint result of God and man . . . unless 
we are to deny the reality of that in us which 
leads us to God at all." 1 It is indeed the 
divine purpose that we realize the apostolic 
injunction to become coworkers with that 
God who worketh in us to will and to do 
of his own good pleasure. "In the order 
of time you embody in outer acts what is 
for him the truth of his eternity." 2 



1 Ward, Realm of Ends, p. 352. 

2 Royce, Studies in Good and Evil, p. 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 269 

The uniqueness of Jesus's life sprang 
from his unique consciousness of relation- 
ship to God and to the world. He solved 
his personal problem as we have never 
solved it, and he looked clearly into the 
very heart of life because his own life was 
lifted to the infinite and eternal standpoint. 
When the clouds that have obscured the 
realm of modern thought have rolled away, 
and the chatterings of a superficial learning 
are heard no more, the intellectual world 
will awaken to the deep cosmic and social 
implications of the incarnation, the depths 
of religious truth will be uncovered, and 
Jesus will come into his own. 

Lifting the Individual Up to the Uni- 
versal Plane 

Just as Jesus solved the problem of evil 
by lifting his life into its cosmic relations, 
so he intended we should find our practical 
solution. An uncompleted world, 1 attended 
by a spirit of unrest because of the un- 
fulfilled yearnings of a "creature moving 

1 Eucken, Truth of Religion, p. 51ff. 



270 CHRIST AND THE 

about in worlds unrealized," speaks in un- 
mistakable tones for those who have ears 
to hear that the solution is not theoretical 
but actual, not universal but personal. 
The personal solution must come first. 
Just as the problem is now unsolved because 
it is a living one, and in the individual life 
calls for constant struggle, so for the race 
it can never be solved until mankind 
universally has emerged from the morally 
evil into the morally good. Then we can 
answer our question abstractly. Till then 
our only solution can be a personal one. 
The Captain of our salvation leads the way 
and it is his purpose "to bring many sons 
to glory." With our lives centered about 
selfish joys and selfish successes, interested 
only from the standpoint of selfish am- 
bitions — the fames, pomps, and pleasures 
of the world — there can be no solution 
whatever. Our personal misfortune or 
seeming misfortune, viewed from that stand- 
point, will cause us to cry out bitterly 
against God and the universal order. We 
shall be tempted to join that sickening wail 
of infants over lost bonbons that has 



DRAMAS OF DOUBT 271 

characterized the aesthetic, immoral, and 
weakening pessimism of our day. 

When the evils of our present life are 
turned one by one into a new sympathy 
for men, into a larger striving after the 
perfect day, the mists that have darkened 
vision fall from us. When our lives fall 
into step with a Divine Will that worketh 
hitherto and still works in us; when our 
lives are looked upon from the eternal stand- 
point, all shadows fall behind us, because 
our faces are turned toward the Light and 
the Ultimate Revelation. 

We can face the worst that life can bring 
with the triumphant joy with which Jesus 
went to his cross. Even our sanctification 
will not be sought for selfish ends nor to 
achieve a passive goodness. It will be 
for a larger serviceableness. "For their 
sokes I sanctify myself" is the word of 
Jesus. 

Jesus ever tried to lift the disciples up 
into this higher order of living in which 
all mysteries should be solved at last. His 
practical word of faith to them was this: 
"In the world ye shall have tribulation: 



272 CHRIST AND DRAMAS OF DOUBT 

but be of good cheer, I have overcome the 
world." 

To face disaster with triumphant soul 
for the sake of the world around you, to 
sink your lesser ills in the universal need, 
to live heroically and to die with one's 
face to the light — this is the only solution 
granted to mortals, and it is enough until, 
speaking in the words of a teacher w T hom 
many loved, "we pass beyond the night 
and know as we are known." 1 



1 Bowne, Essence of Religion, p. 69. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



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(Including only the more important works.) 

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Blackie, Prometheus, in Horse Hellenicse. 
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Wenley, Aspects of Pessimism. 
Owen, Five Great Skeptical Dramas. 
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Lewes, Life of Goethe. 
Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets. 
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Lindsay, Philosophy of Faust. 
275 



276 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Blackie, Wisdom of Goethe. 

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with Eckermann. 

Reichlin-Meldegg, Faust. 

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Grimm, Life and Times of Goethe. 

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Masson, Three Devils. 

Coupland, The Spirit of Goethe's Faust. 

Davidson, The Philosophy of Faust. 

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Stobart, New Light on Ibsen's Brand, Fortnightly 
Review, August, 1899. 

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Boyesen, Commentary on Ibsen. 

Wicksteed, Four Lectures on Ibsen. 

Herford, Brand. 

Huneker, Egoists. 

Dewhurst, The Losing and Finding of Life. 

Russell and Standing, Ibsen on His Merits. 

Bowne, Essence of Religion. 

Bowne, Theism. 

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Eucken, The Truth of Religion. 

Grierson, Modern Mysticism. 

Grierson, The Celtic Temperament. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 277 

Caird (J), Introduction to the Philosophy of 
Religion. 

Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy. 

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Royce, The Religious Aspects of Philosophy. 



DEC 9 1913 









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